That Which We Call A Rose
by Morithil
Summary: Even without the aftereffects of dropping the last of the True Love potion into the well, what's between them will always be magical. Some stolen scenes from the lives of the reunited Rumpelstiltskin and his Belle. Post 2x01.
1. An Indoor Picnic

DISCLAIMER: Alas I own nothing (if I did, Rumple and Belle would rule the world).

THAT WHICH WE CALL A ROSE

It was raining.

Rumplestiltskin – That is, Rumplestiltskin in his Storybrooke guise as Mr. Gold, was not best pleased.

True, Maine was not lauded for its unbroken, lengthy dry spells with requisite sunshine and puffy white clouds, but on the first day when mayhem and madness had not been the order of the day in Storybrooke he had thought to spend it in the best way he could possibly comprehend – a quiet, intimate lunch with his beloved in a secluded spot of the forest that bordered their odd little town.

Fate had never been kind in the hands it had dealt Rumpelstiltskin before, why should she behave any differently now? Now, when his skin was as far from grey-green and shimmering as possible, now when the leg injury that Magic had so beautifully erased had returned with a vengeance, now when he had held his heart in his mouth, twisted, misused little thing that it was and tried to send his beloved, his Belle away from him because it was the best thing to do for her in this brave new world of theirs.

Now, when she had smilingly refused his offer and was everywhere, chestnut waves and sparkling blue eyes, white hands that seemed to be perpetually reaching out to his, slipping between his fingers, over his knuckles, clasping his wrists.

_I'm here_, those caresses said to him in half-whispered tones, _I'm here_.

The picnic basket sat abandoned on the table by the door, the optimistic checkered tablecloth peeking out from under the wicker lid mocked by the shadowy waterfall cast by raindrops cascading down the stained glass of the front door. Gold sighed irritably, standing in the hallway with both hands clenched over the gold handle of his cane. A frustrated toss of his head led him to catch his reflection in the oval mirror that presided over the picnic basket. He frowned. He'd found the mirror in an otherwise unremarkable yard sale, unusual thing that it was, complete with two ornate doors of solid mahogany that closed like wings over the face of the glass when it was not needed. Appreciative of the doors that would render the potential spy portal useless to anyone peeking from the other end, he'd bought it on a whim. It had never been opened.

The glass that confronted him was practically sparkling.

She'd been cleaning again.

His reflection mocked him. No, certainly no reptilian sheen to his face now, no unnerving too-large irises staring back him, no mottled teeth bared like a mouth full of rotting rhubarb stalks. But still the hooked nose, the haunted, angry eyes, the thin line of a mouth held tight like the seam of a jealous purse. The malicious glint of gold over narrow teeth.

An old beast, then. A monster now.

"You're scowling again"

The lilting voice from above shook him from his self-scrutiny. She came down the stairs in swaying, sprightly steps, one fair hand on the banister, the other's fingertips grazing the air beneath it.

The dress he'd bought her clung like a glove, the dark blue lace about her shoulders and neck, the little belt that nipped in her waist gently, the whisper of the taffeta underskirt tapping her knees, all drew the eye and ear to her like magpies. Her pale legs were on show, slender ankles playfully flexing into feet tucked into the heels she'd initially proclaimed as impossible to walk in and now refused to leave the house without. Even now she tottered ever so slightly, and the miniscule half-suggestion that she could fall from the air and into his arms all violets and every warm, sweet thing he'd never had was robbing the breath from his lungs and dotting the tops of his knuckles with white.

Then she was in front of him and her hands were over his, holding them as he held his cane, tightly, as if she were the one in need of support.

"Aren't you happy I'm here?"

She is probably joking, in her smiling, warm way, jesting with him for his bad moods and angry looks. Wagging a knowing, teasing finger at the jaws of the beast, daring it to strike and knowing it won't. When he finally finds himself able to speak though, he cannot help but take her question seriously, his voice suddenly husky, its rhythms erratic.

"Of course I am, so happy my Belle, you've no idea-"

The kiss that presses itself to his mouth leaves it smiling as hers is.

"That's better. The scowl has its own fiendish little charm, but your smiles are so much more-" Her beautiful face transformed into a mask of contemplative thought. He tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, resisting the urge to kiss it before the dark strands left his fingers.

"-Now you're not about to say _charming_, are you, dearest?"

Her face brightened into an enlightened smile. She was dazzling.

"That's just it. Charming. And handsome"

Gold shook off the laugh that her words provoked and grimaced instead.

"I think you'll find yourself alone in your appreciation of my meager attractions"

This time it was she who frowned.

"Don't say that. You're handsome and intelligent and I won't hear otherwise. If no-one else in Storybrooke sees that then they need their eyes checked by a better physician than Dr. Whale"

He dares to kiss her then, to kiss away the hurt and tension in her voice, the uncertain tremor of her throat. His Belle, who would take on the world, tiny clenched fist raised should it suggest that he is not the sum of all her hopes and desires that a man could ever be. Her mouth is warm and soft and invites him in so readily he moans into the back of his throat and decides for the hundredth time that they do not spend enough time like this, holding each other impossibly close, tongues drawing each other into velvet, spiraling heat.

When she pulls back and her hands leave his he is shocked by the emptiness it sends echoing to his very core. He stands dazed without her in his vision until she returns, smiles again and grasps the hand he hadn't realized was reaching out for her, tugging him in the direction of the living room. He numbly realizes she is carrying the picnic basket in the crook of her bent arm.

"Come on, it's time for our picnic, and I'm starving"

He followed her willingly, smirking at the breathless quality of her voice before the weather made itself known again with a rumble of preoccupied thunder.

"Sweetheart, it's a monsoon out there, I'm sorry, we'll have to make it another day…"

His train of thought runs out of steam as he surveyed what had been the living room until a few hours prior.

The furniture had been pushed back to open up the space in the middle of the room. Centre stage was the large Chinese rug that had, until this morning, apparently, been rolled up in plastic and stored with the rest of his collection that had yet to find a space of its own. The deep, forest green of the rug's background threw its ornate, pale blossoms of lotus flowers and chrysanthemums into vivid, unearthly relief. The blooms seemed to float up, spring unbidden from the floor beneath. Plants had been brought down from the windowsills in their pots and adorned the edges of the rug, obscuring such worldly things as table legs and electric sockets from immediate view. The gathering storm outside had darkened the usually bright room, and the sounds of rain against glass and wind in the trees made for a startling intimate soundtrack. All in all Rumpelstiltskin felt as though he'd stumbled onto a secret glen in the Infinite Forest.

Belle smiled to herself at his stunned reaction and knelt on the rug, picnic basket at hand. Briskly she smoothed the lap of her dress before unpacking the contents. He slowly followed her, anchoring his weight into the grip over his cane before sinking gradually to the floor, the ruined leg stretched out before him, the other bent at the knee.

"It seems someone else has been taking lessons in Magic" he quipped, relaxing his hold on the cane to tap it gently against the side of his shoe. Belle blushed into the tea she was pouring before handing the cup to him wordlessly, a pleased smile tugging at her lips. Rumplestiltskin inspected the chip in the fine bone china as he always did before drinking. Anchoring himself.

"I learnt from the best" she shot back, kissing the rim of her cup to his with a tiny, sweet clink.

They drank their tea in silence, enjoying their lunch in similar fashion with only the heavy rain and the occasional rustle of Belle's dress to disturb the precious, stolen quality of their being alone together. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the preposterous house melt away into the familiar surroundings of the Dark Castle, and Belle in her pale blue spring dress, curls half swept away from her face, perched on his dining room table like she'd been there all her life. Rumpelstiltskin breathed slowly in and he was there once more as she leaned in to kiss him, the unwieldy frame of his spinning wheel looming above them both.

_Something changed my mind._

When he opened his eyes again he knew without the aid of a mirror that they were different, pupils blown wide, irises darkened. Belle was curled up in the triangular nook his legs formed, her face pressed to his throat. She was shivering slightly, he noticed, her arms curled around her own body, leaning into him with bare shoulders sensitive to the cool air. He shifted slowly and slipped his arms out of the suit jacket, bringing the garment up and around her shoulders in one fluid gesture. His leg made the sinuous swagger of old somewhat difficult, but his hands had not lost what the boy Henry had dubbed "the flick and swish" that he'd used to flourish every sentence with. Belle snuggled into the jacket's depths, murmuring her approval at the heat it had retained from his body.

"Are you happy, Belle?"

He made a point of not looking at her even when he felt her look upwards to see his face fixing his gaze instead on the scrolled arm of the chair pushed to the far wall. He couldn't suppress the flickering spasm that followed her finger tracing the line of his cheek.

"I'm not unhappy"

He laughed then, an uncertain, relieved, whisper of a laugh and bent to kiss her forehead in the same instance she decided to kiss his chin, both of them pleasantly surprised at finding their lips delicately pressed together. When her hand slipped between them and smoothed the place over his heart he knew she could feel its frantic pulse through the silk of his shirt and acquiesced. Cradling her as close as his arms could bear he kissed her again and again, seeking out all the corners of her mouth that made her clutch at his hair and respond in tangible pleasure.

She is here. She is going to stay.

The rain painted the shadows of teardrops on his cheeks.


	2. Bitten

DISCLAIMER: Alas I own nothing (if I did, Rumple and Belle would rule the world). Reviews will be much beloved! (Anyone curious about the dress would do well to look up Tibi, Resort 2012)

2.

Of all the things that could possibly go wrong on the crucial day before, an insect bite?

Belle sighed unhappily over the glaring, angrily red swelling on her leg. She'd never even _seen_ a live mosquito in this world (although twenty-eight years in a padded room had meant she hadn't seen much of anything Storybrooke had to offer) and now one winged rebel had flown very far north of anywhere remotely subtropical and had decided to bite her. On her leg. On her very pale leg, a leg that was intended for display tomorrow in the dress she'd been waiting weeks for an excuse to wear.

Belle rummaged half-heartedly through the little bottles and tubes that littered the inside of the bathroom cabinet. Her lips puckered into an 'o' of curiosity at the labels before realization seeped in. Of course, his leg.

There were so many pills and potions in the tiny cabinet Belle wondered how one knew what was what and which to use. A tiny memory called from the back of her mind and she sat down on the side of the bath to indulge it.

He'd been gone for _days_. Those initial, startling days of carrying his tea and trying desperately not to jump at a suddenly flicked finger or knowing laugh had passed and she'd only realized how much she enjoyed the unpredictable, amusing, _enjoyable _company of her captor-come-employer when another deal took him out of the Dark Castle's imposing doors and he hadn't returned the same evening.

Consequently she decided to do a little exploring. She'd wanted to see the world, after all. The Dark Castle was a world unto itself, and to have it all to _her_self, to peek behind closed doors, stroke the lush tapestries, climb the many and winding staircases without a mop and bucket in hand was a rare luxury.

His rooms were the most surprising though, and there she'd lingered the longest. The bare stone walls of what appeared to be his own personal hive of alchemical creation were chilly and left her cold less from the lack of warmth they imparted onto the room than from the stark, minimal quality they radiated, so different from the lavish hangings, gilded walls and heavy curtains of the rooms below. The room felt lonely and lived-in all at once. The many and intricately shaped glasses and vials fascinated her, but Belle was wary enough of magic to refrain from touching them, only stooping to peer more intently at their shimmering, mysterious contents. She drank in their secrets with wide eyes, noting the murky, oil-streaked quality of one, the ghostly, ethereal smoke of another, the pristine glimmer of one in a bottle so tiny she could have obscured it from view with a thumbnail.

What could they possibly hold, these glass vials? What secrets, what exotic ingredients, what powers could be unleashed from their narrow necks?

Belle clasped her hands in her lap, a little forlorn. It saddened her beyond measure that Rumpelstiltskin, despite having brought magic into this world (for better or worse she still could not decide) had yet to weave a spell to lessen the pain and inconvenience his leg obviously caused him. She minded it not one bit, except for that he seemed to chalk it up as another facet of himself to dislike. Of course the impossibly quiet, sly dancing step and pinpoint flashing spins on a booted heel of old were more of a challenge than before, but he still moved with an odd sort of grace, cane and all, a sort of measured, knowing step she found it no effort to admire. And he was just as capable of sneaking up on someone in total silence as ever, something his customers were perpetually reminded of every time he seemed to appear from nowhere to scrutinize their interest in a particular item.

A _swake_, she'd impishly christened it in her mind. A swaying, stalking movement with a somewhat rakish edge to it, like a predator who knows he could easily overtake the prey around him but holds back until the last moment to strike, or in her lover's case punctuate his arrival with a soft tap of his cane. Belle's features softened into a fond smile. She did _so_ like the suits he wore here, and even more so the way he always seemed to match his tie and handkerchief to whatever she was wearing. A crimson hue to compliment the belt she'd chosen on impulse one morning. Jet cufflinks to match the embellished collar of a chiffon blouse another evening. Belle giggled indulgently to herself. It was perhaps a good thing he didn't wear the leathers he'd favoured in their old land, or else they'd never leave the house. She'd stolen quite a few selfish looks at his lean thighs and _ahem_- Belle cleared her throat, checking around the open bathroom door in fear of being caught – other areas of interest when his back had been turned.

But still the insect bite.

What to do? The dress was another gift, entirely unexpected and most likely ridiculously expensive (she'd protested that it was neither her birthday nor Christmas on receiving it, beautifully boxed and proffered in both hands, his eyes suddenly downcast, shy. Uncertain). How could she not like it? A simple shape, sleeveless and the hem of the slender, but not constricting skirt fell quite above her knees. But the fabric, pale gold and shimmering, encrusted with sequined petals that sparkled a deeper gold when touched by light, and the modest neckline punctuated with a sharp black collar like one of his dress shirts inserting an unexpected element of challenge? Danger? It was wonderful. _His_ colours.

But how could she wear it now, when this hideous lump had parked itself unceremoniously just above her ankle? It was still too warm for tights, despite the whisper of autumn in the cool breezes blowing through town, and Belle reminded herself with a certain sense of pride that the sight of her bare legs almost always proved one temptation Rumplestiltskin could not resist. In public he was the perfect gentlemen, eyes averted from her legs, gently crooking his arm for her to link hers through or placing his hand, its long fingers spread carefully at the small of her back to guide her through the doors he held open with the other. Once home, however, and once on a heady summer evening in the car, those clever fingers would dance on her exposed skin, smoothing and stroking until her toes curled and her thighs quivered in anticipation of the more delicious mischief that would inevitably come.

No, tights were not an option. Nor were boots. Belle tapped her bare feet absent-mindedly on the floor, out of ideas.

"What's the matter, love?"

She looked up to find her beloved framed in the doorway, a quizzical look contorting his features in an expression of curiosity and concern. Belle yelped, jumping to her feet and turning quickly to close the bathroom cabinet and conceal the horrible bite from view.

"Nothing, nothing! I was just, ah, looking for something. Found it!" she tried unconvincingly. He placed a hand on her arm.

"Are you unwell, dearest?"

His eyes were wide with worry, she saw. Beautiful eyes, she reflected. Deep and expressive, lakes she could happily paddle all day in. Even when they'd been different, marbled, almost too large for his face she had seen no problem in staring into them. She considered bolting for the door but the moment had passed. She sighed in defeat, sinking back down to lean on the edge of the bath.

"I've been bitten"

Rumpelstiltskin's face crumpled into something resembling amused relief. He sat down opposite her on the ornate chair she suspected was only in the bathroom to give him a place to enjoy watching her soak in the massive claw footed tub at leisure.

"Let me see"

His hands cupped together to make a cradle for her foot, his cane forgotten on the floor. She placed her bare foot into the warm, calloused grip and watched as he lifted it to his lap.

"It's awful, and there's no chance of it disappearing before tomorrow"

Rumpelstiltskin eyed the bite carefully, running a padded thumb warily over the swollen surface, eyes intent on her face to determine her reaction. Belle inhaled a shallow gasp. Of course it was sensitive, and dreadfully itchy, but more than the bite the sensation of his touch on her ankle and their positions, she half standing, half-reclining, he crouched low over her outstretched leg, eyes locked on hers conjured all sorts of entirely non-insect bite related scenarios she'd only recently acquired the vocabulary to name.

"Well, let's see what we can do about that then"

She was disappointed when he released her foot and limped sans cane to the cabinet before returning with a small bottle. Resuming his possession of her foot he unscrewed the bottle top and poured a small amount of something translucent into his palm before transferring it in neat dabs to the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

Belle's eyes fluttered when he proceeded to massage the substance into the offending bite, alternating his thumb and the pad of his index finger in circular, soothing motions. A distinct cooling sensation slowly permeated the area that had been so frustratingly itchy and hot. Curiosity got the better of her.

"More of your magic?"

Rumpelstiltskin smiled into his task and that well-loved sliver of a crescent moon sent warmth straight to Belle's heart.

"No dearest, simple aloe vera oil, possibly the best thing for nasty mosquito bites", and here he paused for dramatic effect, "_and all-natural too_"

Belle burst into laughter at the ascent in pitch and comical toss of the head that accompanied his last words. Through her giggles she managed to speak.

"Is that what they told you at the pharmacy?"

He smiled again, showing the flicker of gold over one tooth.

"A medical truth for the ages. In _both_ lands"

Belle stretched out her hand for him and stroked the soft hair that fell across his face as he sat, bent over his work. He leaned into the touch almost unconsciously, and she held his cheek tenderly in her palm.

"I wanted to wear the dress you gave me. Having a huge red lump on your leg rather ruins the effect"

He blinked slowly, as though translating her words into a language he could more easily understand.

"You have other dresses. I've no objection to you wearing whatever you please", he dropped his eyes to her ankle again, working the last of the oil painstakingly into her skin as he murmured, "you shall always look beautiful"

"But I wanted to wear _that_ dress!" Belle bit her lip, suddenly aware she sounded like a petulant child denied a treat, continuing in a lowered tone, "I wanted to surprise you"

Rumpelstiltskin stood slowly, returning her foot to the floor with infinite care before straightening.

"Then surprise me, and let me do the same. Leave the bite to me, and wear the dress tomorrow as you planned"

Belle raised a suspicious eyebrow.

"What are you planning?"

He chuckled softly, a wicked sound that made her want to kiss the smirk off his face and swat his arm at the same time.

"Not telling"

"Rum-" she called out as he turned to leave, worry tugging a cord inside her chest, "you won't use Magic, will you? Not if you don't have to. I don't want you to-"

_I don't want you to leave yourself vulnerable when we still don't know how magic works here_. The Queen – Regina had flown into a frenzy of activity once she'd found her powers had returned and consequently found herself drained of all magical ability for a fortnight thereafter. Wisely she'd kept a low profile in the interim and the knowledge of why had ensured that Rumpelstiltskin kept a close eye over number of times and the specific amount the magic he used at any given occasion. Things were still settling into place, it seemed. It made no sense to use it all up at once.

"I won't", he affirmed from the doorway, "you'll see"

The following evening was a rare treat, the Maine sky painted in watercolour brushstrokes of lavender and orange. Belle gazed happily at it for she knew not how long, leaning on the balcony that looked out over the approach to the house. Then she checked her leg for the hundredth time in the last hour and discovered that, despite being much reduced in size and irritation, the bite remained noticeably red. Belle returned inside and made her way downstairs to the dining room where Rumpelstiltskin was probably still waiting.

'Date night', it occurred to Belle on her way down the stairs, was a terrible expression for something so lovely. What was wrong with 'romantic evening together' or, 'dinner for two' at a pinch? She'd been unable to hide her distaste for the expression when Ruby had slyly enquired as to her plans for the evening when she'd dropped into the café to buy a packet of the fruit tea Granny had started selling recently. The other girl had grinned devilishly and leaned over the counter suggestively at her reply that she was 'busy'.

"Date night with Gold?"

Belle exhaled, a little flustered, and tucked an imaginary stray hair behind her ear.

"His name i-"

Ruby waved her off with a dishcloth.

"We all know his name, Belle, Gold just runs off the tongue better. And quicker. So, date night? Didn't figure him for a romantic, but you know what they say about the quiet ones"

Belle took her teabags wrapped up neatly in a brown paper bag and straightened her blouse.

"We're having dinner at home"

Ruby winked dramatically, the black liner around her eyes giving them a feral quality.

"Do tell"

Belle shot her new friend an airy look as she left, still smiling.

"I might not"

He was sitting at the head of the huge dining table when she came in, his back to her, and if she'd been worried about the bite drawing more attention than she would have liked it seemed all her worry had been for nothing. Turning in his seat, his eyes drank her in slowly from the black heels that had been among his first gifts to her and then up, up disgracefully slowly, taking in her exposed legs, the way the shimmering dress hung gently on her frame, the tumble of dark curls pinned into a loose bun. There was Magic still, she thought to herself, Magic in the way he looked at her, the way his eyes travelled over her body and half-convinced her that it was his fingertips lingering at the hollow of her throat, the curve of her knee, the fullness of her lower lip. Belle could feel the colour rise on her cheeks and she had to remind herself to breath first before attempting speech.

"Sorry, were you waiting long?"

His lip glistened from where he'd flicked his tongue over it sometime between scanning up from her waist to her throat. Belle pulled a chair out from under the table to sit close to him and he stopped her with an outstretched hand, pushing his chair back from the table edge.

"No", he patted the waxed surface of the table, "sit down for a while. I've something to give you"

Belle hesitated, eyeing the impeccable sheen of the table and wondering about the kind of damage her bespangled dress would deal the varnished wood. Rumplestiltskin's smile was brief and a little forlorn.

"You never worried before"

Belle gave a startled laugh, suddenly nervous. Of course, in the Dark Castle she'd hop up onto the dining table without thinking twice. She would sit there swinging her legs quite happily while he leaned back in his chair and indulged her need for conversation over the pyramid of his hands, neither of them thinking anything of it.

"Sorry"

She slipped up onto the antique wood and clasped her hands in her glittering lap.

"No need to apologize, dearest" he searched for something in his jacket pocket and held it, fingers closed tightly around it so she couldn't tell what it was, "now turn this way if you will"

"What?" Belle was first confused, then spun delicately round, his fingers steering her legs round to place her heeled feet precariously in his lap. Rumplestiltskin slipped the shoe off one foot, eyes darting to her face for permission.

"I believe I've found a solution to your insect problem"

Belle folded away a grin. He sounded very sure of himself. Then his finger trailed up the arch of her foot and she reminded herself that he normally had good reason to. She loosened the pin holding her bun in place, the updo suddenly too formal, too distant. He paused as dark waves fell heavy around her shoulders, distracted.

"And there we have it, the bite has vanished and you are possibly even more beautiful than when you came in"

Belle looked down in surprise. Around her ankle, and completely covering the offending red lump was a little, well, _cuff_, she supposed. A delicate band of opaque, silken black material three finger widths across sat as snugly around her ankle as a garter would further up her thigh. Scalloped in black lace and embroidered with tiny black roses it looked for all the world like an extension of her shoes, a romantic strap to secure the foot safely in the towering pumps. She was so caught up in her examination of the item she started when he removed her other shoe to slide a matching band to her unbitten leg.

"You think of everything, don't you?"

He shrugged, a little sideways motion that pretended modesty but gave away his pleasure at her approval. She tapped her bare toes on the tops of his thighs in a stuttering, teasing rhythm and watched with bated breath as his throat worked visibly.

"You like them?"

Belle tapped out a drum roll in response. "I love them"

There was no room for words, not when he held her ankles in his lap and then reached upwards, cupping every inch of her legs as he strove upwards in one smooth stroke, over the rise of her knees and holding reverently, jealously, long fingers spread over the outside of her thighs, slipped under the hem of her dress. His head came to rest on the skin the shimmering fabric had drawn back to reveal, one lean cheek pressed to the top of her thigh like a repentant sinner. Belle closed her eyes and leaned over him, running her hands over his back in soothing movements that did nothing to quell the skittering light burning a jagged fuse through every fibre in her body.

"I love you" she managed, pressing her lips into his back. An answering kiss was swiftly pressed to the inside of her left thigh, its deliverer shuddering.

"And I love you too"


	3. Crocodile Tears

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing, nothing I tell you! (This chapter is set post 2x04…the feels, just…I will be emotionally useless for the rest of the week)

3.

Seven days after he'd given her the library, her own place to live and a job, she caught him watching her admire a window box of blooming flowers.

She hadn't been prepared for the sad, nervous smile on his face. The smile that crinkled his mouth _a mouth that kissed her soft and sweet or drank her down entirely_ and moistened his wide brown eyes _all magic has a price _hurt her, a dull, nauseous ache in her belly for which the only cure was running to his arms and kissing it away.

Smiling back was a poor second best, but she managed, and tried not to let the tears show. Him standing there, both hands leaning on his cane with magic at his fingertips (the more literal crutch of the two) and the wind gently stirring his hair was nothing short of torture. Even motionless, silent, Rumpelstiltskin would always be a force of nature. She knew that now, and would never fail to be moved by that maelstrom.

The gratitude in his face when she smiled back fortified her resolve. He _could_ make right choices. He could be kind and generous and honest. He could understand her needs and respect her wishes.

She walked away and spent her lunch break dampening Ruby's tissues with her tears. _Not yet._

Two weeks after she'd first stepped inside the library they met by chance on the street corner. It was a windy day and her hair had been whipped into a tumbled frenzy courtesy of a sharp gust that promptly took the delicate slide out of her dark hair and sent it rattling along the ground. Burdened with a tied stack of schoolbooks that Henry had given her (it turned out other small children weren't particularly thrilled by Longfellow and neither Belle nor Henry could not understand why) she'd given up on chasing it and resigned herself to losing the first little trinket she'd bought herself when she found him stooping awkwardly to pick it up in a gloved hand.

"Thank you!"

Again that smile, and he held out the little hair slide to her in a gloved palm, devoting his gaze to the ground at her feet. She took it hesitantly, briefly balancing the books in the crook of one elbow to reach for it.

"Thank you, Rumple"

"You're welcome"

They stood stock still like that for a moment before inspiration seemed to take him.

"The apartment, is everything alright? No problems?"

Belle shook her head. "It's perfect. And thank you, again. I never did say thank you the first time. That was awful of me"

This time he shook his head, calmed, it seemed by her words.

"Awful is a word better suited to other creatures. Belle, I-", the barely controlled mask slipped back into place just as she suspected he was about to offer to carry the books, "No matter. Take care"

She saw how his gaze roamed the waves flying around her face, touched on her lips and throat even though it completed its circumference in little under a second. She heard how his level voice shrank to a near whisper on his last two words.

"I will. You too, Rumpelstiltskin"

His smile cracked his face and her heart in one quick stroke. The tail of his coat brushed her leg as he stepped away and she felt it like a physical blow.

_I didn't mean to say I never wanted to see you again ever. I didn't mean it, except for in that horrible moment of anger and frustration and fear and never again afterwards._

He hadn't taken her up on the hamburger offer yet.

Another windy day a little over a week later and she found herself shivering outside Granny's waiting for Ruby to open up. It was a terrible day to forget to wear a scarf, and turning up the collar of her coat did little to warm her throat.

"Here"

He is holding out a bundle of something soft and undoubtedly warm. Words failed her this early in the day, it seemed, and so she took it silently, unraveling a woolen scarf long enough to loop several times around her neck and promising all kinds of soft comfort. There was no store label. It was a dark gold. She couldn't help her eyebrow arching slightly in suspicion.

"I've no ulterior motives, I promise", he gestured at the scarf, "I wasn't only spinning spells in the basement that night"

His voice is small, pretending lightheartedness and almost succeeding. It holds no reproach for her suspicions. She forgives him instantly and gratefully winds the scarf around her neck, snuggling delightedly into its soft folds.

"_Oh_, that's better"

He taps a long finger to his forehead in what would be considered here an antiquated gesture of gentlemanly courtesy. She nearly curtseys in response.

"Rumpelstiltskin"

He freezes in his tracks, a caged beast whose enclosure has been suddenly opened.

"We can talk, you know. Talk, and see each other, and smile, and -" She's reaching out now, she can see it happening in slow motion as though time is unraveling again and the years will wind to a slow stop with the two of them in the center. Her hand brushes down the length of his coat sleeve and finds his hand at its conclusion. No gloves today, and for that she is ridiculously pleased. Their fingers curl delicately, more reflex than conscious action. His breath escapes him in a ragged gust. She holds hers.

"About that hamburger…"

The clang of the door opening suddenly behind her makes her jump. Ruby's exasperated face peers round it, all apologies. He stops mid-sentence.

"I'm _so _sorry, Belle, you should have knocked or something, I would have let you in sooner – hey"

The last part is to him. He half nods, half bows in response.

"Miss Lucas"

"The rent isn't due until next week, but I'm sure you knew that"

It's when he doesn't even rise to Ruby's less than subtle bait that she realizes.

"I did indeed, Miss Lucas, I'm not here to deal out undue harassment. Belle"

And with that he's gone, swaking – _walking_, she reminds herself, away from them. Ruby's expression speaks volumes. Belle shoots her a knowing look.

"You're impressed"

"I've gotta say I am. Thought he'd go for that one"

Belle gratefully stepped into the warmth and unbuttoned her coat. Ruby gestured at her usual booth as she always did and Belle slid into the seat contentedly. The werewolf's clear eyes studied her in the morning light.

"He's changing"

Belle managed a nod before her voice returned, "Yes"

"And yet you seem more miserable than when you told him to stay away?"

Belle sighed unhappily, conceding an affirmative headshake. She counted her fingernails.

"I miss him"

"I think the feeling is mutual"

And then suddenly, some days later (nine, to be exact, except she hadn't realized she'd been counting the intervals) they bump into each other again in the street and Belle reaches out straight away for his hand and clasps it in hers. He gives her a puzzled look.

"Hello"

"Hey"

"Are you going to the library?"

He has the decency to look guilty and the foresight to realize that admitting it really is the best option.

"Me too"

She leads him off gently and he follows hesitantly.

"I'm in need of an escort, you see", she clarifies. He manages a chuckle.

"In that case I believe I can oblige"

They continue in silence, a leisurely stroll and she realizes all over again how comfortable it can be with just the two of them, like two halves of the same coin that slot effortlessly into place. A teacup and saucer sort of comfortable. Except it would be _oh so much_ better to link both her arms around his and lean her head on his shoulder. And so she does. He slows to a stop.

"Belle?"

She'd forgotten the smell of him. Like pines and morning fog and something warm and faintly spicy underneath. A mixture of herbs that history forgot. Wiry strength in the arm wrapped in coat sleeve and suit jacket. She can't even begin to reproach herself for snuggling._ I will go with you - _

There's the faint ripple of chatter from somewhere and he looks up to see a young couple, barely out of their teens by the looks of it, and out-of-towners too. They're walking down the opposite side of the street and from the rushed turn away they've been watching he and Belle. Talking about them. Laughter in hushed tones. It's so irritating and petty and so unspeakably awful he almost forgets to scowl, and then he sees their reflection in the shop window they're standing in front of.

There's silver in his hair. It's been there for twenty-eight years and not one strand more or less despite time starting up all over again, but it's there and he can't keep from staring. The lines on his face are not, as their name would suggest, from years of belly-aching laughter. Would that they were. The confident, easy stride of the youth holding his paramour's hand jars heavily in his brain as he studies the grip he holds on the handle of his cane. He has been a disappointing husband, a murderer, a sorcerer, a trickster, a poor father and a worse lover to this, this _beauty_ clinging to his arm, all freshness and light and high ideals. In this land he is old enough to be her father. The horrible truth is that it is not decades, but centuries of darkness and scheming that separate them. The only person he has ever been friend to looks back at him, a darkened vision in the glass.

_You're a monster, Rumpelstiltskin._

_At your service_, he thinks bitterly.

"Belle, no, wait- "

She looks up at him with a face so happy, so _dreamy_ for crying out loud, as if she were the one on the arm of some strapping young beau. He shoots the still-fascinated teenagers a warning look and clearly the unspoken threat of disembowelment travels well as they scurry off like scattered birds. Belle followed his look and watched the young couple trot giggling away.

"What is it?"

"Nothing", he brushes off, "nothing. They're probably wondering what you're doing with me"

She reestablished her hold on his arm.

"What am I doing with you?"

_Run home Rumple. It's what you're good at. Oh yes dear, I certainly will. _The words spill out unchecked, an artery punctured at last. He doesn't even have to try, honesty not being the best colour on him withstanding it all pours out like poison from a wound. He remembers the look on her face as he held up her heart in front of her. She'd never smiled for him, not even once. He can barely remember their wedding day. She'd channeled her efforts into trying to forget.

"Wasting yourself on an old villain. Best leave me alone, dearie, throwing yourself away to a monster is never a good idea", he very nearly stops when he sees her face, trying with all his might to tear himself away from her and her mouth is opening and he knows what will come out. Words of denial and comfort and telling him all the good things he is and could be except it's all three hundred years too late and he would rip his own heart out from his chest if there was a single chance he could make her one hundredth as unhappy as he'd clearly made Milah-

"-You should know I killed her. My wife", he can hear his voice breaking in his own ears and the vain, apocalyptic thought that maybe he too will break and shatter into hard, hollow pieces right there in the street is oddly comforting, "I took her heart. I took her heart and held it up for her to see so she would know. So she would know how it felt, how it felt to see her leave her child, _our only child_,my Bae and not look back, not with eyes or heart and leave us hopeless and broken and alone. _He needed his mother_", his eyes grew hot and fear gripped him as the threat of tears surfaced, snarling, "and she left him with _me_"

One last tug and he is loosed and turning, turning away so she will miss the sting of hot tears beginning to cloud the world around him. _No one can ever love me_, he'd said. Perhaps _no one ever should_ made more sense. He can't say goodbye again.

He hurries away trembling and doesn't see her composing her thoughts to the rhythm of low deep breaths.

There's the threat of rain in the heavy gray clouds overhead when he finally gets home and it couldn't be weather more suited to his mood. Shedding both coat and jacket he proceeded with purpose to the wine cabinet and rummaging in the back, ignoring the numerous and expensive vintages in front of him produced a small flask.

He is going to drink until the alcohol hurts more than he does and then look around for something inanimate to destroy.

The first swig burns the back of his throat and the familiar heat it sends coursing through him promises all kinds of numbness he is far too gone to refuse.

Rumpelstiltskin in love. There's no other sentence he can currently think of that is more hopeless or futile. Or terribly, laughably sad.

He's lost track of time and hasn't managed to decide between taking his cane to the glass of the back door or the mirror in the hallway for starters. He's loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt and sits quietly focused in his chair. Oh yes, it's been two days, and he still hasn't found anything to smash into a thousand pieces yet. He'd spent yesterday sprawled in the bed that had remained unmade since the day she left, winding limbs and face into the sheets to chase the last traces of her into memory. The house is freezing. He'd decided something at least; that it wasn't worth turning the heating on if you're planning on setting fire to the place.

Clearly he hasn't drunk enough yet. The doorbell announces the arrival of someone and hauling himself upright he decides whatever misguided unfortunate is on the other side they will probably wish they hadn't bothered existing.

Or maybe he has drunk enough, as the vision standing calmly on his doorstep looks the very picture of his Belle, all dark waves, milky skin and everything he does not deserve. She holds up a hand to silence him and he obeys the beautiful illusion without question. Gentle mirage, she can do whatever she likes with him.

And then her hands are smoothing his hair, clasping his face in soft, warm palms and she is pressing her forehead to his.

"Let me say my piece, now that you've said yours"

She leans back a little, still framing his face in her hands.

"You did a _terrible_ thing, and I've spent every waking moment thinking of nothing else since you told me"

He braces himself for the assault.

"I never knew my mother. She died giving birth to me. I never knew her touch, her face, her smile, her voice, anything. Maybe all I have are other people's memories of her, this loving, warm woman I never knew. But I can't understand what it would mean to have a mother who _wasn't_ loving and nurturing and _there_. And I can't understand what taking anyone's mother away from them would achieve except more pain and more loss. But _anger_, betrayal, frustration, _loneliness_? I can understand those"

She inhales deeply as if in preparation.

"Do you remember what I said to you the day you sent me away?"

There have been so many instances that that phrase could refer to but he knows which one she means. _Go. I don't want you anymore._

"I said no matter how thick you made your skin it wouldn't change your cowardice"

"I remember"

"There's one more thing that won't change either. I told you about it once. You weren't in the mood to listen"

He finally looks at her, expecting pain, frustration, anger discolouring her lovely features. It's with dim shock that he finds her face calm and open, her beautiful eyes resolute.

"True love"

He closes his at the very sound of it. Two tiny words. Two brief syllables and his whole world comes crashing down, brick upon dark, cursed brick.

"True love, Rumpelstiltskin. That will never change. It will never go away, even if you want it to, and I don't believe you want it to. _I_ don't want it to"

He's crying now and there's no point in stopping, no point in worrying what coincidentally present neighbour will see him weeping on his own doorstep like a lost child. Fat, warm tears are seeping out from his tightly closed eyelids and her thumbs gently stroking his cheeks are rubbing them into his flesh. Spring rain on burnt crops.

_If he should ever, ever reach for her with rage and venom, ever to take her sweet, perfect heart – the very notion alone makes his head spin and his stomach revolt against him. Never. Never. Never._

"I won't change either. The lame spinner, the Dark One, the deal maker, child snatcher, the Crocodile, the madman, the murderer, the monster", he opens his eyes and rivulets stream out anew, "_I'm Rumpelstiltskin_"

"Yes you are", she rejoins, "You are Rumpelstiltskin and those are the things you were. I'm looking at the things you _are_", another tender stroke of his face, "and this is your beginning". Her voice is firm and yet tender. _Loving_. It lowers slightly and he feels her urgent murmur like another caress.

"_I fell, very hard, very quickly for you"_

He feebly tries to shake his head but the gesture becomes a deep shudder.

She presses her forehead to his again and inhales deeply, as if she's trying to commit the scent of him to memory before walking away, and walk away she should, he reflects. It was good of her to say goodbye.

"Ask me to dinner, Rumpelstiltskin"

And now he really has gone mad. He doesn't even hear the clatter of his cane falling from suddenly limp fingers and can only process the softness of the pleated skirt she's wearing as his hands latch onto it to stop shaking.

"Ask me to dinner, Rumpelstiltskin"

The tears roll with deafening finality off the edge of his jaw. It is impossible to lift his eyelids. In this darkness he can pretend that what he's hearing is some fractured reflection of reality. Truth, amidst all deceptions. Where he has taken her hand to whirl her into a dance and not a dungeon. Where he tells her anything and everything she could possibly want to know about the treacherous depths of the void in his chest.

"Ask me to dinner, Rumpelstiltskin"

It started as an old wives' tale but one day he'd decided on a whim to inject truth into it and the centuries had made it law. _Call my name three times and you will summon me, dearie._

Third time's the charm.

He feels alien wetness on his cheeks and it's with a startling clarity that he realizes that she too is crying. There are words to be said and it takes courage to say them. _Hard work and honesty_. David Nolan's words ring like a litany in his reeling mind.

"Have dinner with me", a painful, sore swallow, "Please", her sweet breath puffs against his chin and she is smiling, laughing through her tears, perfect rosy lips curving into wobbly delight, "I'll order you the best hamburger Granny can make"

And then there is sound to her laughter and somehow it's infectious as he's laughing too and love _is_ a disease and may there never be a cure. Her arms are around his shoulders and his have tentatively found their way around her waist. She hugs him tighter still and so it's with permission that he pulls her closer, closer. Her voice is tremulous and hopeful, trying to be brisk and assertive and half-succeeding.

"You can pick me up at seven? On Friday?"

He nods yes frantically and her hands are smoothing his hair again so he can breathe once more.

They stand there on the doorstep, noses touching and eyes wet with each other. Later he walks her back down the approach to the house and gives her an umbrella so that the light shower doesn't touch her on her walk home. She doesn't need an escort this evening.

But another time she will.


	4. The Library

DISCLAIMER: I still own nothing. Thank you all so much for the wonderful and generous reviews, I hope I don't disappoint!

4.

It was still too early for any visitors to come to the Library, so it was unsurprising that he'd caught her in a rare moment of self-indulgence, convinced she was alone in the warm, quiet space that was now her kingdom. She ruled alone here. Oh yes, there were frequent volunteers, helpful souls who offered their time so that she might better enjoy hers, but it was without question that between the hours of 9 and 5, Mondays through to Fridays, Storybrooke's Library might as well be called Belle's Library, for here she was Queen.

_And long may she reign_, Rumpelstiltskin added to himself.

The desk was usually spotless and tidy, which made the opened and apparently forgotten delivery box, trailing its paper and plastic innards across the wood something of a novelty. She was almost completely concealed behind the desk, sat in her chair and totally absorbed in the hefty tome clasped in her hands. Rumpelstiltskin took advantage of her oblivion to the outside world to observe his beloved at leisure.

Her hair was pinned back today, half-up, half-down in that familiar style from their old land. Her lavender sweater was cut in a style again very reminiscent of another place and Rumpelstiltskin mouthed the word to himself in bemusement. _Peplum_. Would it be long before corsetry made a reappearance in this world? Privately he hoped not. The image of Belle in her long satin gown the colour of liquid gold, shoulders bare and waist cinched in for him to circle with a glittering, black-nailed hand had not lost an ounce of its potency in all the years he'd spent without her.

When she sniffed, a forlorn, tiny little sound it broke his reverie and startled him into the discovery of tears pooling in her lovely eyes. He hurried to the desk.

"What's wrong?"

It was with a mixture of relief and adrenaline that he realized she neither jumped nor seems much affronted by his sudden appearance but simply dabbed at her eyes with a delicate finger and closed the book in her lap, bravely attempting a embarrassed smile.

"It's nothing, just something I was reading", she collected herself with a determined breath, "it was very moving"

He breathed a sigh of relief, "So I see"

He eyed the now discarded book's spine in curiosity. _1Q84_. He hadn't read it, although he'd dipped into Murakami now and then over the twenty-eight non-years spent in Storybrooke. He peeked into the delivery box. _Jane Eyre. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. _New books. Of course she would be captivated. That first glimpse of her revealed as much, long before Maurice's goons had opened the heavy doors to find nothing waiting for them, surprised into silence by his appearance in the vacant throne behind them, _that first glimpse_. He didn't need to look again when he voiced his price for an end to the Ogres' destruction of the tiny kingdom.

Belle had been standing in a corner, listening carefully to the men's conversation while being clearly ignored by all others in the room. He'd never seen a woman, girl of her stature so enamoured of a text and so discreetly but interestedly informed of the ins-and-outs of a war cabinet's discussions. A heavy leather-bound book clutched to her breast like a treasured object too precious to abandon. The last time he'd seen a woman with a book in her hand his insides had burnt with a queasy solution of secret triumph and nagging unease at the carnage that would inevitably ensue. Belle provoked no such misgivings – she simply stood there, listening, her bright eyes darting between speakers, never missing a beat and never giving her involvement in the debate away. _Clever girl_, he'd smirked to himself then. And she was beautiful, of course, but all ladies of all courts throughout all the lands were expected to be so. He'd never seen gold look quite so alluring on a woman before, though. A prickly hue, it robbed fair-haired would-be princesses of their colour and appeared tacky on others, too obvious. On her though, his colour was rather _pleasing_.

"Have you actually come to borrow a book?"

Belle was raising a smiling eyebrow at him from her chair. He smiled back as guilelessly as he could, which was impressively so.

"Indeed I have. Anything you would recommend to a poorly-read pawnbroker?"

Belle shook away the laugh his words nearly induced. "You're hardly illiterate. There were more books in your library than I'd ever seen in my life", she emerged from behind the desk, suddenly wistful, "and you'd actually read _all_ of them"

He shrugged non-committally.

"When you have centuries at your disposal, reading becomes more than an idle luxury"

"It's a good book", she replied, "I won't have it catalogued and wrapped until later today, but I could be persuaded to loan it out on a special first-preview basis"

"1Q84?"

She nodded excitedly.

"There's a lot I don't understand, but these two characters, they have such a strong bond. They don't even interact much as children, in fact the only thing they have approaching a relationship is one day when the girl suddenly holds his hand one day when they're ten years old. After that they spend twenty years apart, but they're always thinking of each other"

He smiles, touched by the admiration and affection in her voice.

"And what do they do, these two star-crossed lovers? I take it they're not prince and princess of some far-off kingdom?"

She looks at her feet, sheepish.

"Well, he works as a teacher and he's very good at it. He enjoys his work. But he also writes in his spare time and I think that's his main passion. She ah-", she worked her heel into the floor, "mainly kills people for a living"

Rumpelstiltskin glanced away, swallowed the bark of amusement that tickled the back of his throat and grinned appreciatively, "Well, there are dirty forms of work in the world and some people have to do them"

"She doesn't like it!" Belle defended her fictional heroine, "and besides, she only kills terrible people. Men who do awful things to women and children"

His expression darkened. This time it was he who found himself studying his feet.

"There are many forms of men in the world as well"

Belle eyed him with a careful look. Then she took him by the elbow and led him down past the neatly labeled rows of shelves until she found the little corner. She'd put two chairs together to make a cosy space for anyone who wanted to curl up and read in private or sit very closely with their True Love and talk of secret, heavy things. They sank into the chairs, quite snug against each other from shoulder to knee.

"There are many kinds of women in the world too", she reminded him, "and some of them are capable of more evil than others can believe"

The look in his eyes whenever she mentions Regina is something, alright. Those eyes, honey-brown and alight with intelligence and amusement and a million different endgames shifting and shuffling darken terribly. Suddenly there is a hawk in a man's form sitting beside her, round eyes ringed in gold and bottomless, unfathomable. Something deep-rooted, angry and silently simmering glitters in them and it always reminds her (not that she's ever had cause to forget) that Rumpelstiltskin is very, _very_ dangerous.

She hadn't slept, those two nights after his confession. Not a wink, tossing and turning until morning finally arrived in the sliver between windowsill and curtain.

_He'd killed his wife._

At certain points in the day she'd been certain that it would drive her to madness. Initially she'd shut herself up in her bathroom, hugging her knees on the floor and imagining that having a good cry would be a primary solution for the chaos of emotions running through her. Instead she'd found that she couldn't cry, sniffling dry sniffles and running her hands tiredly through bed-mussed hair. She'd cried before, cried for people she did not know, for soldiers and families killed and devastated by the Ogre attacks. A little girl wailing in the cobbled streets for her father while a mother with a pain-wracked face tried in vain to hush her. An old man holding his wife when a messenger brought the news that they'd hoped would not come. A young bride had thrown herself into a lake on learning her husband of a few precious weeks would not be returning to their new home and had wilfully, deliberately drowned. The long lace train of her wedding gown had dragged her to a watery death as though designed for that purpose alone. Belle had not been supposed to hear that last terrible story, but she'd always listened in on any conversations concerning the welfare of their people and their village and her need to know had come at a terrible price. She'd spent the afternoon sobbing in her room and only emerged after bathing her face several times in perishingly cold water to remove all trace of the telltale red puffiness around her eyes when it was time to greet her father.

Love did such terrible things to people it was a wonder anyone dared fall in love at all.

Tears failing her, she'd tried to create her, this woman, this wife of Rumpelstiltskin, this mother of his only and much-beloved child. She'd tried to assemble features, a voice, a face to this woman she had never met, who had left her husband and child for reasons she did not know and had yet to ask about. This woman who had paid the price for her desertion with her heart and her life was an unknown entity.

Could she not cry for this woman because of the pain she'd wrought on Rumpelstiltskin and Baelfire? Was she already guilty of judging a woman she'd never met and never would on the basis of one act that defined and ended her life? Belle had given up on that subject of analysis as soon as she'd begun.

Rumpelstiltskin, on the other hand, she could consider herself versed in knowing a few things about, at least. She had seen rage on him, seen it conduct a violent dance with his body and voice, rendering him a terrifying, destructive puppet all bellowing snarls and lashing talons, half-cobra, half-tiger. She'd heard the shatter of breaking glass even from the dungeon afterwards, trembling with every brutal smash from above. She'd seen power as well, power in the aloft hand that calmly carried her back from the town boundary and oblivion defying logic and gravity. Power that opened the handcuff around her wrist with a decisive cut through air and improbability. Power in the strange, black tipped hand that swatted away Gaston's sword, a blade she knew he kept even the tiny ridge to the flat side of honed to hair-splitting sharpness. He'd swatted it away, palm to shining metal with the air of one cuffing the head of an errant child. Oh yes, she had realized in the small hours of the first morning after, she could understand how his rage could bring him to murder. She also understood, from the look on his face when he'd spat out his own name like something horrible had grown up on his tongue, tears wetting his cheeks that he regretted it and so many other things besides. She's seen two men cry in her entire life. Her father, and Rumpelstiltskin.

_I went down many paths_, he'd said. It had made her shiver to hear it, to think of the many dark, twisted and terrifying roads one could take, that would change you so much that the end and the means to your quest could have almost nothing in common.

"I've never had trouble believing anything of that particular female of the species", he delicately spat from behind closed teeth. Belle rubbed his arm, comforting.

"I know. _I_ know, too", she admitted with a sideways half-smile. He looked at her questioningly with the face of a man who wants to know but thinks he cannot bear the knowledge when it comes. She rubbed his hand in hers, not sure which of them she was reassuring.

"She showed me once. The wall of hearts in her castle. I suppose she wanted to frighten me"

Rumpelstiltskin's gentle clasp on her fingers tightens to a degree just below painful.

"I'm so sorry, Belle"

She smiles at his apology. "I know the two of you have", she tries to give a reasonable name to their animosity, "a_ history _together, and I know – well, I've figured it out for myself that to some extent," she looks right at him, "you bear some responsibility for the person that she is", his eyes narrow as he winces but does not deny, "but not all. There were stories of you, how you knew those desperate enough to call on you for help, how you somehow found those who had been pushed to the brink by life, by things they could not control," she paused for breath, "but I never heard anything that said you forced those unfortunates, that you gave them no choice. _I_ _chose_". She smiled again at the memory, twenty-eight years and counting has no impact on that rare, impossible moment in time, "I chose, and you didn't push. You stated your price and I agreed to it. No-one forced my hand, no-one put a blade to my throat, no-one said 'do this or die,'" Belle stroked his hand fondly, "you yourself warned me, even as I agreed. 'It's forever, dearie', you said"

"So I did", quietly, "but the hearts? You saw?"

"Yes", Belle swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, "so many, all compartmentalized, all in little drawers like an apothecary's supplies. Catalogued. This one belonged to a beautiful princess, this one to a giant. This one to a great hunter", Belle closed her eyes as the Queen's voice resurfaced in her mind, "like a shopping list"

"Well come, come, take a look"

A smooth beckon with a white hand. Belle stood rooted to the spot, fingers itching to clasp themselves in something, her skirts, each other, fists. The Queen turned elegantly in a sweep of black velvet and lace, sleeves drawn tight about her wrists and fanning into long trails of fabric that reminded Belle of spiders' webs or the skeletal outline of trees in winter. Cold.

A smile as white and red as blood and bone.

"Come now, you're not as clueless as all that. You've lived with Rumple, after all, little housekeeper. We all know the Dark Castle isn't called that because he keeps the drapes closed"

_He doesn't anymore_, Belle bit back in her mind. She took a step forward. The Queen beamed approval.

"Good girl. Now I'm sure you've seen one of these before – no doubt Rumple has a little sinister side to his beloved collection," opening a drawer while looking at Belle over an arched shoulder, "so I'm not destroying any innocent ideals about your former – hmm, which was it? Master? Lover?"

She opened her mouth to respond with fierce retort but the glowing, small thing in that otherwise beautiful hand keeps her jaw open and her silence betrays her. Such a small thing, it looks so vulnerable and alive, faintly pulsating in the Queen's white fingers, an unearthly red and pink and _light_, as if some sort of energy hums away inside. Then Belle remembers what it is and nausea sweeps through her. A tucked-away childhood memory of the butcher dissecting a carcass into the different cuts of meat. The unrequired organs slipping away secretly, wetly into a dark bucket. The neighbourhood dogs yapping approval later in the afternoon and she'd run home as fast as small legs could carry her, hands over her ears and hungry until the next day as the evening's roast dinner could not be faced. This too is an organ, but someone requires it still.

_Wrong. Wrong._

The Queen's smile is slow and smug. She flicks a fingertip in Belle's direction and pulled by an invisible jerk both hands tug upwards, palms cupped as if asking forgiveness and then she tips,_ tips_ her hand over and that small, lonely thing is in _her _hands now, still warm and vaguely wet, too smooth to belong to anything alive and breathing. There is no choice between letting go and holding on, Magic holds her hands in a powerless limbo and Belle finds herself breathing hard and fast, shallow breaths to delay tears and the dry heaving of her empty and repulsed stomach.

"Oh, you _hadn't_ seen one? I would've thought he'd have let you dust them, or something"

"He doesn't have _these_", she managed between gulps, "I've seen the collection"

The Queen eyes her with sympathy.

"Oh sweet girl. I'm a terrible hostess, lying to you like that. _Of course_ he doesn't keep hearts. He crushes them straight after taking. Like this"

Those red-nailed fingers are warm over hers and pushing shut and Belle tries, tries so hard against the force of Magic and the human strength crushing her fingers shut like a clam. For a split-second she imagines irritation flickers over the Queen's countenance at her resistance but then her palms are closed together and the small, beating thing between them drifts, ashes and dust through her closed fingers. She stares at the remnants trickling to the marble floor in silent horror.

"I like to think he enjoys it", her captor muses, idly pushing the drawer closed behind her and removing the seal, tearing it up between her fingers. For days afterwards Belle would wonder what was written on the tiny scroll. What name, whose title, what image reconciled the ashes on the floor to a person, an animal, a life.

"He has a talent for destruction. The swift and the prolonged. Evil always does"

Belle wiped shaking hands on her skirts. _He asks if I'll accept roses. He says he'll get used to daylight and open windows. _

"I don't think he's that simple to define"

The silence as the Queen regards her in the light of her statement is near deafening. Belle wonders if her heart will take the place of the one just destroyed.

"I can see why he chose you. I won't kill you just yet. You've earned a few – _years_ grace with that. But little girl, you have no idea who Rumpelstiltskin is. What he does. What he's capable of", the last part she smiles a glittering, pearl-white smile into as if confiding a lewd secret, "Just between us girls. There's no better teacher, no harder taskmaster, no dealmaker more ruthless or exacting. No insanity more _knowing_. And no Dark One darker than dear old _Rumpelstiltskin. And I would know_"

Beauty is a terrible thing, Belle decides as the Queen brings her face close to hers to croon the last few words softly. That face is ravishing, dark eyes, arching brows, smooth skin and perfect teeth behind impossibly red lips. She can't explain the how or why but the Queen's loveliness is so terrifying, so much more horrid than Rumpelstiltskin's odd eyes and reptilian countenance. There's something so blatantly dishonest about the Queen's beautiful face Belle's brain practically bursts with _liar, liar_.

At least Rumpelstiltskin wore his scales on the outside.

She whips them both out of the dreadful room with a hiss of Magic. The doors tone booming behind them with deep finality. She puts an arm around Belle's shoulder, confidential, friendly.

"My condolences. I can't speak from experience, but it must be _difficult_ knowing the one you love doesn't feel quite the same. Ah, but then his attachment to his collection is only material. I'll say this for you; you're certainly the prettiest thing he's ever owned. Shame it wasn't True Love for him too. A curse is so very hard to live with, but then I suppose what's a little discomfort when you have immortality?"

Her laugh echoes off the walls and inside her head when she is returned again to her cell.

Belle bit her lip hard all the way back to the dungeon. One singular fact kept her feet going, one step and then another. One truth the Queen didn't seem to know.

_It was working. True Love can break any curse._

He is silent the whole way through her retelling of her tale, his hand gripping hers tightly. It shakes when she gets to the part about the heart disintegrating between her hands, fury and despair swirling in his wide eyes.

"Tell me", she asks, "tell me about her, and other things. You_ can_. Tell me when you want to, or when you think you should, or when you feel ready"

"There's a lot to tell", he reflects, ruefully watching their fingers interlock, "and none of it pleasant. But, I'll try. I will, Belle. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. So ask, when you want to. I'll tell, if I can"

She smiles for him again, pleased beyond measure.

"It's because you told me, you know. You told me the terrible thing you did. For someone who's spent all his life being a coward", her voice is gentle over the damning word, "you showed a lot of courage that day. That weighed up quite in your favour, once I'd sat down and thought about it properly"

His face erupts into amazement and gratitude and then he's leaning in, desperate and longing, moving to kiss her, his hand reaching up to stroke her cheek. She places a soft push against his chest in refusal and he stops, realizing the impropriety of what he'd been about to do.

"You_ have_ recently confessed to murder, a kiss will have a wait a bit longer", she admonishes, "It's only Tuesday"

Three days until she can taste a hamburger and declare their tentative, beginning-all-over-again relationship in public.

"I'm sorry", he apologizes, ashamed, dare she say it, even embarrassed, "it's just-"

he gazes at her wonderingly, "you make me hopeful. Hopeful for so many things. Things I haven't had and haven't been"

"Thank you", she blushes delicately. No-one compliments quite like him. She recalls Gaston's stiff recitations of other people's praise of beauty and giggles. She'll take Rumpelstiltskin's soft, urgent apologies over any gilded verse of romantic cliché any day. They mean something.

He takes 1Q84 with him, waiting patiently as she wraps the cover in protective film and slowly, methodically (computers will take a little more time and practice) prints a label for it.

When she locks up that evening she remembers the nightmares. The ones where she'd be once again in _her _dungeons, alone and frightened of what the next day would bring. The ones where she wakes up in a hospital gown and padded walls greet her hello, her only visitor a beautiful woman who looks in through the small slot in the door and says nothing but whose visits leave her shaking and sleepless. Then there's one where she wakes as if from a deep sleep and finds her hands holding a heart again, only this time it isn't just her and the Queen in that mausoleum of love and life, but Rumpelstiltskin too, leaning heavily on the wall of hearts, one long fingered hand clutching wearily at his chest, eyes wide and locked on hers.

"Look after it dearie", he whispers in a death-rattle of his normal whimsical song, "I only have the one"

She'd sit bolt upright, gasping. Those first few nights in a bed that isn't bolted to the wall are unsteady and he never asks but simply understands. Looking to her left she'd find him stirring. He is a light sleeper. One murmur from her in the wake of the nightmares and he's already half-awake, limbs unwinding into movement, consciousness, offering shelter for her to curl into. This time she's dumb with fear and horror and he simply pulls her gently down beside him again, folding both arms around her, tucking her head under his chin where she can feel his sleep disheveled hair tickling against her brow. He wraps his legs around her lower body, even though the injured one must hurt him, cocooning her in warm, protective limbs.

She thinks back to Regina calling her another item in his collection. Possession cannot be denied, she admits, turning the key in the library's lock and testing the door once more, just in case. He has so much of her already. So many firsts, her love among them. In a way he does own her heart. But possession goes both ways, she decides, walking home, and it needn't be so horrifying or one-sided.

"Take care of it", she'd warned as he took the book from the counter, "I won't have dog-eared pages or tea stains coming back to me. There are fines for that"

He salutes her, book in hand, "You have my word"

It's maybe her overactive imagination, but she swears there's a spring in his step as he leaves. So pleased over one borrowed book. He's the one who gave her a library.


	5. Sunlight

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. Thank you all again for the kind reviews – it's great having an insight into how a fresh pair of eyes reads my stuff! If it's not too much to ask please keep them coming!

5.

It's the first time she's seen him with them on and it proves rather disconcerting. Holding back on the street corner, library key primed and ready in one hand, a hot styrofoam cup of Granny's tea in the other, Belle watched him cross the street, the glaring almost-winter sunlight darting off the handle of his cane and the sunglasses obscuring his face.

"They make him look like a gangster"

Caught off-guard she very nearly jumped, turning to find Henry staring quizzically in the same direction she'd just been. She smiled knowingly at the small boy.

"I think he likes it. Hey Belle"

"Good morning Henry. Shouldn't you be-"

"On my way to school? Yeah. I just wondered who you were spying on"

Belle shrugged resignedly. Guilty as charged, then.

"Do I fit the bill for a bonus Operation Cobra agent?"

The boy smiled winningly in response, shouldering his rucksack with a critical air.

"I'd say yes, but you've gotta work on your observation skills. I snuck up on you _way _too easily"

Belle nodded in rueful agreement, "That does seem to be weakness of mine. Well, I can't deny you certainly surprised me. I promise I'll work on my awareness"

"Okay. Great, I'll see you later? I've got another book report due and they don't have anything at school I haven't read twice already"

"Got it. Take care"

She watched him scamper off with an affectionate grin. It was reassuring at least that there was someone in this town who shared her hungry love of books and reading. Henry disappeared out of her line of vision, a small, excitable figure running, visibly encumbered by the weight of his schoolbooks.

"Should I be jealous?"

She sighed happily, turning smoothly to face him, eyebrows slightly raised in mock challenge.

"Well that depends entirely on you"

She doesn't jump with him. Silent as his step remains, unannounced as his arrivals frequently are, she has no reason to start at his appearances. First impressions included, he has never struck the blind, rabbit-terror into her heart that she sees shadows of reflected in the eyes of others who look on him. His anger is not to be underestimated, that is as certain as the sun rising from an eastward direction, but his presence alone? Belle has never found it a trial. A mystery yes. Oh yes, a mystery. That first day she'd strained over defensive arms, broad shoulders, desperate for a glimpse of the one they never called by name unless in the most dire of circumstances. Like a child, curious of a stranger and eager for the chance of a closer look, she'd sought that first glimpse of him out quite of her own accord.

Rumpelstiltskin smiled, then gave a short half-bow in good morning. Sunlight glittered off the frames of the sunglasses perched on his nose. Belle frowned, pocketing the library key to free her hand.

She reached up and over, lifting the offending item carefully away from his face. Folding the arms up delicately, one-handed, she studied the uncovered face beneath them. He blinked in the harsh morning light, lashes guarding suddenly sensitive eyes.

"What was that for?"

"Your eyes", Belle accused, handing him the sunglasses back, "I can't see them with those on"

He slid the sunglasses into the breast pocket of his coat, digesting her words slowly.

"And that's important because…?"

"I like your eyes", Belle finished, "I like looking at them, into them. When you have those on it's like you're hiding. Putting up walls. Defences. So no-one can look in"

"It's a sunny day"

"Henry says you look like a gangster with them on"

He scoffed away an amused laugh.

"So I_ should_ be jealous"

Belle swatted his arm gently in rebuke. He was taking this far too lightly. Rumpelstiltskin, master of avoidance of sensitive subjects.

"I'm serious. You don't like people looking at you, do you?"

His face grew somber, wary. Belle could almost count the window shutters going up one by solid one, closing him off from the world. Up with the drawbridge, unleash the moat. A swirl of dragonhide and off he'd go if he could, she imagined, up to the lonely tower and his glowing vials of who knew what sort of Magic.

"On the contrary, people look at me all the time, frequently with a mixture of distrust and – well, distrust is potent enough by itself"

That wry smile is such a broken thing, she thought to herself. Kisses alone will not mend it.

"But you don't like it"

He sighed tiredly, leaning on his cane in what Belle suspected was a physical plea for clemency. She wasn't buying it.

"There's not much to look at, dearest"

Belle pressed her lips together tightly. It was Thursday. She could allow herself one preemptive strike before tomorrow and hamburgers.

"Lunch. What are you doing?"

She's not sure which outweighs the other but delight and surprise fill up in those brown eyes like hot tea poured steaming into china cups.

"Is this an invitation? We do", he shifts, one foot to the other and she tucks away the

thought that she is the only person to make Rumpelstiltskin _bashful_ for secret, gluttonous consumption later, "have plans for tomorrow still, don't we?"

"We do", she confirms happily, tugging on his coat sleeve, shaking off the tiny debris of self-doubt and anxiety dusting the fabric, "but what are you doing today? I have an hour, and a sandwich behind the desk isn't so appealing the fourth day in a row"

He grimaced in dismay at her description of her dining habits.

"Can I come to your house? If you're not busy, of course"

He beams in spite of himself. She's sure she hears glass breaking somewhere as someone sees Mr. Gold smiling broadly in plain daylight.

"Of course you can. You're always welcome, Belle, you know that. My door is always open to you"

Her smile is as broad as his. His eyes glitter hazel and autumn under the crisp sky.

"I'll see you after 12:30 then"

"You certainly shall"

Mission accomplished, she strode purposefully to work. On arrival she checked through the post, ran a keen eye over the neat shelves and settled into her chair with anticipation as much of her lunch plan as the day ahead. Running a hand over her dark hair she brushed against something thin, crackling. Drawing it out she produced a small, withered leaf. An autumnal vagrant taken up residency in her curls. Smiling absently, she twirled it between thumb and forefinger, timidly patting the rest of her locks to ensure no other vegetation had been blown into it. It wouldn't do for the town librarian to look as though she'd woken up in the hedgerow.

The leaf pirouetted dizzily in her hand.

Appearances. They were so important, both here and in their old land. The reason Granny matched her sensible tights to her sensible shoes, Ruby her nails to her lips. The rationale behind her father donning heavy burgundy robes before council meetings, letting the heavy fabric drop to his bulky shoulders as if to further feel the weight of responsibility and leadership. The thinking behind her hair twisted back and secured with a pin, tresses neatly framing her neck, corsets laced with equal precision, skirts smoothed. Belle turned thoughtfully, catching a dark reflection of her face in the dim screen of the as-yet inactive computer. It gave her pause, to look at herself with something more than the necessary, brief morning once-over to check she was presentable to the waiting world.

Large eyes with long lashes. Dark waves of hair coiling thick about a heart-shaped face. Pale skin and delicate lips. Determination about her jaw and dreaming at her forehead. It was a face like any other, serviceable to a fault. She thought of Ruby's angular cheekbones, the wild tint to her eyes, the drama of her fine features like a dancer's body, trembling just before going _en pointe_. Belle saw difference and admired it. She did not, could not assign levels to beauty. That was like quantifying love, impossible.

_I knew you could never care for me._

She'd been dumbfounded, bewildered and later outraged at that statement. Why not? What was so impossibly hard to believe about one person feeling love in their heart for another? Yet there were too many conflicting truths to deal with at once and therein lay the difficulty. She thought, bizarrely and yet perhaps not, back to the black-and-white film she'd happened upon flicking channels on the still barely-used tv in her apartment. The dialogue between the hero and heroine came back to her as if from underwater.

_What's wrong with you?_

_Nothing you can't fix._

She had looked at Rumpelstiltskin then and seen an enigma. A fantastical being, steeped in lore, shrouded in legend, operating, inhabiting a separate world from anyone else she'd ever known. He'd seemed wrought from the wildest and most imaginative tales she'd garnered from her father's modest library, animated and alive to the gaze. Later he had been a whimsical jester with flickering hands, a lonely soul, a quietly grieving father. A creature with eyes you could read like a book, given to acts of spontaneous kindness, understanding. A man whose voice deepened, grew husky if following a kiss. But hold those truths, those she knew for herself up against the others that existed? Rumpelstiltskin the beast; a monster with glittering, unearthly skin, a witch's cackle. Eyes like something four-legged and dreadful from the depths of the Infinite Forest, unnatural and unholy. Nails and teeth like a corpse, she'd once heard the kitchen maids whispering to each other in excited fear. Belle looked away from her shadowy double, half-ashamed at the prettiness staring back at her.

In her eyes he was not ugly. Others would laugh, she supposed, if she proclaimed him attractive. Most kept their distance. No, she mused, he was not the handsome prince that her girlhood friends had all aspired to ensnare, all broad shoulders and dashing good looks. She'd been the envy of many when her engagement to Gaston had been publicly announced, but tall and handsome as it could not be denied her betrothed was, Belle had been left oddly numb by the knight's presence. Superficial, she'd said then. So superficial. No depth to his conversation, no real involvement in his listening. He asked no questions and answered those directed her way before she'd a chance to argue her cause without the entire village thinking Maurice's daughter was a bold upstart with ideas above her station.

Rumpelstiltskin listened attentively, his odd face awake to her words, expectant in her pauses. He asked about her, her decisions, her thinking. _And is it everything you hoped?_ She'd wanted to look more and longer at that face, those eyes, transparent as a child's and then fathoms deep, murky, swirling pools of untold stories. Up close his skin was no more repulsive than hers, shimmering in the half-light, strange and beautiful. Just like the rest of him.

Yes, _beautiful._ Belle straightened business-like in her chair, stacking the morning's post neatly, the leaf propped up under the computer screen. Privately she resolved that there was nothing that needed fixing regarding her True Love's appearance, merely his attitude to it. Was it too much to hope to achieve progress in an hour?

"Belle"

Opening his front door to her feels like a gift. He beckoned her indoors, away from the outdoor chill and she stepped in, toeing away any street soil from her neat boots onto the doormat. He held out his hands cautiously for her coat and was pleased no end when she twirled smoothly about, undoing the buttons to let the garment drop into his waiting grasp.

"I've made tea already"

She grinned in response, "I thought that was my job"

He huffed amusedly under his breath, "There are no _jobs_ for you in my house, Belle. Not any more"

She nudged past him into the dining room, throwing a playful look at him over her shoulder. It made his good knee tremble.

"So I can throw away that apron then?"

It was good to laugh with her, to joke gently, to recall the past while constructing their – their what, exactly? Future? Dare he assign the word? Rumpelstiltskin pulled out a chair with exaggerated courtesy and she, smiling, sat down at once. Having her here, in his house, smiling up at him was already more than he'd expected he'd ever recover, once the words _ever_ and_ again_ had dropped, millstones from her lovely mouth.

She sighed into her steaming cup, returning it to the china saucer with a satisfied clink.

"You do make an excellent cup of tea"

He feigned humble modesty. She laughed in his face.

"Don't do that"

"Do what?" He asked, his bafflement sincere.

"That, that _thing_ you do", she struggled to articulate for smiling, "that sort of little sideways shrug, looking up like you don't know what to do with a compliment" Her stockinged toe sought his foot out under the table and prodded insistently, "you _know _you're handsome, _really_"

Rumpelstiltskin leaned over his half-empty cup, cradling it in both hands. In the hot liquid a twisted version of his face looked back, warped and magnified by the angle. _Spindleshanks. Hobblefoot._

"I don't know what you're talking about"

It was amazing really, how he, with no discernible effort could transform the very air around them with a few quiet words. All joviality and warmth seemed to evaporate, leaving a cool, stilted politeness. Belle resolved to ignore it and finished her tea with relish, eyeing him determinedly. He sat so very still, head lowered, transfixed by the contents of his cup. But it was the resignation in his face that made her stomach twinge, the morose look of a man who endures, but endures unhappily.

Seeing him so beaten down was intolerable. Belle stood suddenly, the chair scraping out almost violently behind her. At the sound his head flew up.

"Come on" she made her way round to his side of the table, "There's something I need to show you"

"What's that?" There was no point in asking when you'd already risen from your seat, he rebuked himself, but she _her hand suddenly in his, pulling insistently_, she could not be denied.

She led him up the stairs and down the long corridor until they came to – and his breath caught in spite of himself – the bedroom. The bed that for well over a month now had not had the pleasure of her between its sheets. Half-immersed into recollection of heady, dreamlike moments, _hours_ spent there he had to shake himself free when he registered her hands deftly undoing the buttons of his blazer.

"Belle, what-"

"Lie down"

His eyes widened at that, and she rose what was an impressive I-mean-business eyebrow at him. Cautiously he sat down at the foot of the bed, lowering the cane to the carpet, suddenly very aware of the shirt and tie he was wearing. Belle draped the discarded jacket over the back of the chair in the corner. Noticing his inactivity she placed a stern hand on one very tempting hip. Mentally throwing his hands up Rumpelstiltskin shuffled back on the bed until he was stretched out across it, head cushioned by the plump pillows but most certainly in a horizontal position. She nodded approval and he found himself toying with an ornament on the bedside table to avoid her eyes.

He only turned back when he felt her weight on the mattress beside his hip. She sat on the edge, looking down at him with unnerving focus. He swallowed.

"Belle?"

A soft, half-smile, "Let me look at you"

He winced, fidgeting somewhat against the soft duvet, tossing his head to find some angle where she could not take all of him in at once. Then he felt it, her warm, perfect hand placed slowly, methodically against his chest. He bit back protestations. He was no flustered bird in need of petting to calm a hammering heart and ruffled feathers. The hand smoothed his shirtfront, coming to rest over the organ that gave the lie to his unspoken denials. It beat frantically for her. It always would.

"Rumple, look at me. Please"

She should have been a sorceress, he thought madly. Her quiet _please_ held more power than that Regina's allowance to him ever had. His eyes secured hold on the tendrils of dark hair swaying slightly in the air over his stomach as she leaned over to emphasize her request.

"A little bit higher", he heard her lilting voice as if from another room. A fractional movement and he had zeroed in on that beautiful mouth, lips faintly flushed as though she'd bitten them on impulse. She did that, he reminded himself. Bit her lower lip, particularly in moments of decision or realization. It was a tiny, unremarkable and hopelessly erotic movement and he didn't know whether to be grateful or disappointed that he'd missed it.

Evidently she'd decided he was taking far too long en route to meeting her eyes, as in the next few seconds he found himself securely pinned to the bed, wrists encircled by elegant pale fingers, a gloriously warm and far too beautiful Belle straddling him, her knees on either side of his angular hips, her weight familiar and devastating in her current position.

"Look at me, Rumple"

He looked then, willing his body into indifference at the sight and sensation of her on top of him. Today she was wearing a dress of soft wool that mirrored but could not eclipse the bluebell tint of her eyes. The fabric clung sweetly to her waist, snug about her breasts and flared out over her thighs. Bell sleeves brushed against milky forearms and feminine wrists. He was no longer looking. He was staring. His right arm was being lifted to point in a certain direction and a firm thumb suddenly pressed to the underside of his wrist and there – the trigger found, now that all of him was given over to her making it so simple, his Magic whipped back the heavy curtains to let light pour abruptly into the room. He shut his eyes in the initial glare. Opening them slowly, she remained where she was, bathed in light gold. A goddess.

She _looked at him_, looked _into _him, or so it seemed. Rumpelstiltskin froze against the bed, half-expecting to shrivel up into ashes or frogskin once she found whatever fault she was searching for that wasn't already apparent to the naked eye. She looked at him. Back from another time they came. Half-conversations. Speaking without looking each other in the eye. Milah only looked at him, he admitted, only really looked at him when she let fly a taunt or complaint. He should have known that evening, known that her promise to try was not heartfelt when she agreed without fully meeting his eyes. Then again he had grown used to not being looked at, not being seen.

_Just my husband._

But _she_ looked at him as if she saw _something_, _someone_, and it frightened him to think what it was that she saw.

Belle sighed and the exhalation pulled his eyes up to the workings of her smooth throat, the lifting of collarbones under velvet skin. Time passed, he did not count the moments. It could have been hours and he would have proven a contented prisoner.

"Beautiful", she breathed reverently.

"Yes", he whispered in hearty agreement, drowning in her. Her smile was knowing, half-mischievous.

"I meant you"

Realization dawned remarkably slowly when one was taken by surprise. For all the small eternity he had just spent gazing at her like the personification of beauty that she was, the fact that she was looking equally intently at him, bright eyes traveling leisurely over his weathered features had utterly escaped him. Until now. Reality returned with a cold slap to the face, a creeping ice in his gut. What was she seeing, in the grey hairs, the narrow, crooked teeth, the crow's feet about his eyes, the decidedly underwhelming physique beneath the silk shirt and expensive tie? The unforgiving daylight revealed all. He lifted his gaze to finally meet hers, fearful of what he'd see. Then there, in her shining, wonderful eyes, a tiny image emerged, doubled. Two small faces looking back into aquamarine pools, faintly incredulous.

An ordinary man caught in their depths. He almost started just to think of it.

Belle stared. Under the pale yellow sunlight _like spun straw become gold_ she took Rumpelstiltskin in. There was power in the wrists she held loosely in her hands. No brute, blunt force. Long, artistic fingers with strong joints. If she had never seen him at his wheel she would have taken him for a painter in a previous life, laying brush to paper with a practiced flick of a supple, trained wrist. Nothing but lean muscle under the dress shirt, measured, exacting strength, nor more or less than was needed. But his otherwise slender build was deceptive, she'd found that out on falling into nothingness from the top of that ladder and being caught securely, safely in arms that continued to hold her for long after until the surprising _new_ physical contact jolted them both back into awkward propriety.

She brushed his forearms indulgently, feeling the sinew and muscle under the silk. The sun picked out the myriad browns in his hair, rich teak and walnut and oak. A fine-spun thread of something metallic. Silver birch. In this light his face was thrown into sharp relief. High cheekbones. An elegant, almost aquiline nose. Slender but sensuous lips. There she lingered longer than was probably necessary. There were lines, of course. He was not a young man, had not been even when they'd first met. Lines of care, faint traces across his forehead, more resolute about his mouth. The crinkle about his eyes that framed them softly. And the eyes themselves, large and deep set. They were mahogany in normal light with hazel in the iris; now glittering and bronzed. Exposed under the strong midday light pupils of jet-black were shrinking and flowering in a hypnotic rhythm. They waxed and waned under her gaze, holding her in thrall as they were in turn caught, unable to look away.

She remembered the hunting birds they'd kept in the old land. As a child she'd been first mystified, then repelled by the sight of the proud falcons blinded by the faintly comical hoods snuffing their vision until their keepers saw fit to remove them. She'd stolen some, one damp morning. Secreted them away into her shawl and used them to adorn the heads of her dolls because creatures that soared so high and saw so much shouldn't be blinkered like carriage horses.

"_Belle"_

He watched, engrossed as she shuddered out of her intense study. She leaned back, relaxing her weight and he pushed himself up slowly onto his elbows and then upright to bring him level with her. She massaged his shoulders.

"I mean it"

He nodded in acknowledgment. He heard his own voice, rough and uneven.

"I know", he fingered an errant curl, eyes on her face, "for a moment there, I think I believed it"

"Well", she huffed, obviously pleased with herself, "that's my mission accomplished for today"

He considered the remaining hours before he took her out for – of all things – a hamburger. And here she was regardless, so generous with her time, her smiles, with him. Two brief words formed on his tongue and were resoundingly cut off by a small sound pitched somewhere between a murmur and a gurgle. Her eyes widened before she bit her lip and looked intently at the corner of the room. He burst out laughing.

"I take it you'll be needing that sandwich now"

Her shoulders shook in silent, embarrassed giggles.

"Rum-", he paused, mid-way into regretfully sliding her out of his lap to let them both get up, "I'm not saying don't ever wear sunglasses"

"A gangster, was it?"

She shrugged in confession and slipped away, stooping to pick up his cane before holding it out, shining handle first for his hand to grasp. He took it and rose from the bed.

He cooked her lunch, despite her qualms about time and being late. What was his huge kitchen for, he'd argued, using the tone of harassed reasonability that always seemed to both irk and amuse her, if not to cook in? A simple plate of pasta that he watched her eat, hands clasped under his chin. She'd breezed out later, heels clicking away from his door as she refused a lift with something about fresh air and exercise being good for you. He closed the door slowly after that, the coloured glass vivid in the noon light. Turning back into the house he unconsciously stopped; looked back.

The hallway mirror's doors were firmly shut over its glass. He'd flung them closed after coming home that horrible day and not thought twice about it afterwards. The wood panels were quietly closed, looking quite as though they expected to remain so.

Rumpelstiltskin took a deep breath and opened them.


	6. Captive

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. This is post 2x07 – I live in Japan, so OUAT is not, much to my chagrin, televised on a weekly basis, so I'm basing any references to specific episodes on what I glean from YouTube and Tumblr – please forgive any unintentional slips! Reviews are much beloved!

6.

He's fuming by the time he gets there. Substitute Sheriff Nolan would have done well to call _him _on being informed that Belle French, _his_ beloved was currently tied up in her own Library. He considers all the timely favours he could call in as retaliation for that charming piece of negligence, but his own "this one's on me" rings in his ears and you should always start as you mean to continue so that is the end of that.

As for the Lucas girl – he snarled at a stray piece of newspaper blown around his ankle, teeth bared – there are all manner of verbal strips he would like to tear off her, considerate _friend_ that she is proving to be to Belle.

It's dark on the streets, but despite their relative desertion there's unease, a humming, active tension still loose in the air. The mob out for wolf blood is dispersed, but its sentiment? Gold sniffed the air critically. Suspicion, fear and ill ease clouded the cold night. He didn't need wolf senses to feel _that_.

All lights but one are extinguished when he gets to the Library. It flicked off at his approach and he nearly stopped in his tracks as the suddenly dark building loomed ahead. It is_ not_ an omen, he reminds himself.

He is not afraid of the dark, anyway. Rather the reverse is true, he idly considers, watching his own shadow flee from his approach in the light of the receding streetlamp.

Tied up. Cuffed. Chained. All manner of scenarios had blown through his brain on learning off her plight. He imagined her unable to move, shivering from the cold, bound limbs numb from discomfort and every sickening image drove him on faster, leg be damned, coming as close to a storming march as it was possible for a man relying on a cane and one good leg to attempt. Why was he never there? Not when Regina poured honeyed attempts at coercion into her ear, not when Maurice's hired lackey snatched her off the street and placed her, terrified, in the depths of the mines, not when she'd cut herself on the sword he'd displayed on a raised plinth by the dining table.

"What have you done?"

One hand clasped tightly in the other she looked up skittishly at his snapped inquiry, reading anger and irritation where he had only felt sharp dismay at the red dotting the scrap of cloth between her white fingers.

"I was just cleaning," she gestured vaguely at the gleaming blade with a clearly unintentional toss of mahogany ringlets, "my hand slipped. It's my own fault, really"

There's a blush about her cheeks and throat and he tries to stop the word _delightful _forming in his head. He fails. A scowl is imminent.

"What were you doing fussing over that relic for?" he flicked an expressive hand at the sword, stalking forward. Confusion pooled in her eyes.

"You said I was to dust your collection," she replies, "I finished what was in the cabinet this morning, so I moved on to the rest"

He darted a critical eye to the cabinet. Even in the twilight he could see the contents and the glass that framed them were spotless. She's taking him at his word.

He points aggressively at something, eyes still on her hand and a high backed chair flies out from its place at the table. She looked blankly at the chair, at him and then again the chair.

"Oh! Thank you", she sat neatly down, trying to smooth her skirts and keep pressure on the wound at the same time. He stands over her, lips pressed firmly together.

"Show me, dearie"

Slowly she peeled away the cloth, now scrunched into a tight ball in her palm. The cut is not deep, but it has bled quite impressively and she winces at its angry crimson.

He leans over, bending at the waist and passes a darkly glittering index finger over the cut. Her eyes follow his black fingernail as though drawn by a magnet. He does not touch her, but the Magic does and the cut vanishes in a small stream of purple smoke. He straightens stiffly in the praise her gasp affords him. He supposes that is unintentional too.

"That's – um," she exhales in a short, surprised puff, "Thank you. Thank you, Rumpelstiltskin"

It's probably the first time he's heard his name on her lips. He isn't sure what to make of it. He sniffed dismissively, turning on his heel quicker than intended.

"Can't have my only caretaker out of commission, dearie"

It was always princes who rushed to the rescue, he reflected irritably. Swords aloft, inherent _goodness_ practically seeping from every pore. Not that David Nolan had any designs on Belle, that was ridiculous. The way he and Mary Margaret looked at each other broadcast loud and clear that as far as love was concerned, they might as well be the only two people in the world, so unlikely was the notion that they'd even spare a glance elsewhere. It was sickening, really.

Now if it had been him, what sort of rescue would he have conducted? His Belle was alone in the darkened Library, unable to move more than a foot or so in one of two cramped directions. He'd have flung the doors open, fingers fairly spitting Magic, and rushed to her (well, _rushed _was optimistic, but a cripple was entitled to dream, damn it all).

Her beautiful eyes were pale and relieved in the shadows. Quiet, sincere gratitude sparkled therein.

"Rumple"

"Belle," assessing her restraints in a hundredth of second, "let's get you out of here, sweetheart"

Magic darted out swiftly, unspoken. Her bonds clattered useless to the floor. She rubbed her wrists ruefully, reawakening the blood flow.

"How did you know I was here?"

He reached for her pale wrist, the indentations still clear on her flesh.

"Your friend Ruby has some scruples at least. She called me. I would have been here sooner but some faceless cretin slashed my car tires at some point this evening. Woe betide him when I catch him and his blade"

She managed a watery smile. "Poor Ruby. She didn't mean me any harm. She thought it was the only way to protect me from her. From the wolf"

He grimaced at the pink grooves cut into her skin, so close to drawing blood.

"I'll live, Rumple"

He shook his head, agitated. "I can't see you like this, like – you're no-one's prisoner"

She stroked a sore hand through his hair, tentative, the beginnings of something vaguely impish tugging at her lips.

"Not even yours? I came willingly enough, if you remem-"

He cuts her off with the merest brush of a kiss against her abused wrist, inhaling sharply at the softness his lips discover. She echoed the sound louder than either of them expected and then it's so warm suddenly in the space between them and between the curve of her back and the shelves behind it.

The spark burns sweetly, hotly through him and he trails deeper, more heated kisses along her wrist and forearm as her hand fists in his hair and guides him closer against her, stepping back against the stacks. A poor cushion for her but he is beyond stopping now, he has dreamed, feverish, lonely dreams. Turning on his solitary bed knowing she slept in another room, the Dark Castle housing them both and even that impoverished intimacy is enough to make his blackened toes curl and his fingers talon the sheets. On the bleak mornings that inevitably follow such torrid nights he dons extra armour, stiff dragonhide and fiercely buttoned up waistcoats as though to ward off phantom embraces that never materialize. She says nothing but eyes him with bemused hurt each time, wondering what it is she's done to merit the prickly layers heralding the offence taken.

One night he'd spent awake, driving himself insane as the notion of her pressed gently against his library shelves presented itself unasked for. Would that she bares her throat to him as the Belle of his lonely, disgraceful fantasy does, letting him lavish open kisses on her milky skin. Would her fingers clasp as deliciously in his stiff curls as in this sweet torment, her body all inviting warmth, supple-

Her yelp shatters what is left of his equilibrium. Eyes wide, she half stumbles against the Library door, hand pressed reassuringly to her chest.

"_Rumpelstiltskin_," she breathes, "you startled me"

He shifts, guilty. They'd almost collided, she emerging abruptly, unexpectedly from behind the closed door to lock up for the evening, he, half in another world of entirely his own making had taken them both by surprise.

"I'm sorry," he toes the pavement and means it, "I didn't mean to. I heard what happened, just-"

"Thought you'd check up on me?" she finished. He nods numbly. Her smile is relieved.

"Thank you," she offers, but I'm more worried about Ruby, really. I could hear the mob from inside here," her lip bravely trembles, "I thought they'd tear her apart"

"She'll be fine," he reassures awkwardly, not possessing the right vocabulary to say more. She is dry-eyed but the tears are in her voice and her face, he notes perplexedly, is quickly ripe with affection and something approaching pride. When she launches herself at him he meets her with arms open, wrapping them around her with satisfaction and relief, though he does not quite understand the reason for her sudden embrace. She hugs him tightly, _protectively_, and when she releases her grip on him and slides her hands to his shoulders her eyes are suspiciously bright.

"The world's rather unkind to my beasts" she manages, cupping his rough cheek in her palm, lowering her eyes to his shirt collar. He closes his eyes, uncaring of the word she unthinkingly pronounces to his face, uncaring that he and the Lucas girl are grouped together in the same unlikely category, uncaring even of the spectre of unreasonable jealousy that her affection for Ruby conjures. Only hearing the gift of her possession of him, only mindful that on her tongue, from her lips, the title that denounces him an animal is an endearment, sincere and loving. She buries her lovely head in his neck, leaning into him gently and he clasps her dark locks reverently, his throat full and voice tight.

"I think they'll manage"

He walked her home to her apartment and they quietly arranged to reschedule the much-anticipated hamburger. Granny will have her hands full for other reasons and Ruby will need checking up on herself, Belle reasoned and he reluctantly agreed.

"_Next _Friday," she insisted, fingering the lapel of his wool coat, "come hell or high water you are buying me that hamburger"

"Yes I am," he affirmed, watching her play with his buttons, smoothing the front of his coat with a proprietary air. Her eyebrows arched beautifully at the adamant tone to his voice.

"I think you're looking forward to that hamburger more than I am, " she prodded.

"It's not the hamburger I'm looking forward to" he smiled, a reptilian sliver in the dark.

Belle gave his shoulder a playful push. He exaggerated a stagger backwards, hand over his heart,

"I don't recall agreeing to share _anything_ with you next Friday except a hamburger," she chided, chin lifted primly in the air, "I would hope you prove a perfect gentleman"

Rumpelstiltskin looked affronted at her insinuation. Then saucer-wide eyes narrowed to predatory slits as he saw the opening.

"So we're _sharing_ this hamburger now?" he leered, "How…_intimate_"

"Rumple!" Belle laughed into her outburst and lunged forward to place a well-deserved swat on his arm. He sidestepped, turning on his good leg, avoiding her attack neatly. He raised a sardonic eyebrow.

"Losing your touch, dearest? You've got two good legs to my one" _Two very beautiful, shapely legs_, his mind finishes for him.

Belle grinned at the challenge.

"Don't worry about me, Rumpelstiltskin," she straightened proudly, "I'm more than capable of keeping up with you"

And well he knows it, but he can't help baiting her with an amused chuckle.

"Oho, really now"

She darts forward again, skipping off the pavement and grasping his elbow, landing a definite, determined kiss on his cheek, perilously close to the corner of his mouth. He freezes, eyes wide. She looks almost as surprised at herself as he is. He opens his mouth to say something, anything. _Yes. Again. Let me return the favour._

It's then that she finishes him with a half-serious cuff to his upper arm. He taps his cane thoughtfully, defeated.

"Goodnight, Rumpelstiltskin"

He lifts his head to see her off.

"Goodnight, Belle"


	7. Of Hamburgers

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. I wrote this before 2x08 aired (still haven't seen it in its entirety yet, Japan being Japan and all). Your reviews are treasured like chipped cups!

7.

Steam rose in puffs, curls, ferns trailing smoky tendrils that evaporated around head height. Rumpelstiltskin leaned forward, chin perched on his folded hands, in turn clasped around the top of his cane. His eyes were unblinking, fascinated.

She paused, one faintly pink hand stroking halfway up the arm of its mate. Eyes flickering shut she smiled that secret smile, the one she'd given him, head lowered to smell the rose he'd offered her. The smile that said so much and yet left him wanting to know everything, the what, the how and the why of her every thought.

"What are you thinking of?"

Belle opened her eyes, head leaning back against the roll top of the bath. She turned slightly to face him and he couldn't help but sigh a little at the glorious visage she presented him with, damp curls finger-combed back from her face and snaking about her shoulders, floating in the perfumed water. Practiced antagonism and rehearsed guardedness melted from his features like salts in a bath. Her bath.

"I was just remembering our first date," she murmured.

He smiled, lids lowering at the memory.

He picks her up outside her apartment at seven in the evening, as promised. Never mind the midday shower that threatened to dampen this momentous occasion; that dissipated soon after tea. Never mind the full hour he'd spent tying and retying the knot in his dress tie that had never given him quite the hassle it decided to this evening; he'd succeeded in the end and now, single crimson rose in hand all the magic in this world and their own could not undo the fluttering, bizarrely pleasant queasiness of the winged insects that had taken up residence in his stomach.

Rumpelstiltskin had never felt smaller, more ordinary, more _human_ in his life. Not since Bae emerging, quietly mewling, enthusiastically kicking into existence, into the tiny cottage that would be his birthplace and home had Rumpelstiltskin's world narrowed so breathtakingly quickly to a space that could only be taken up by one other person.

"Is that for me?"

He shook himself free.

"If you'll have it"

She giggles softly in her throat and the years dissolve like confetti in rain. He can't see much of what she's wearing under the light coat she's donned this evening but there's a flash of something sunny and wonderful from under the outer garment's hem and he's never been so keen to see a yellow dress on a woman in his life.

"Shall we?"

"We shall", she replies jauntily, looping her arm through the crook he's made of his own and they walk slowly to the beaming lights and white-framed windows that herald Granny's diner to the encroaching darkness. She clasps the single rose gently in one hand, lifting it to her nose every so often to inhale its scent.

They slide into a booth – _her_ booth, as he is promptly informed. He supposes that he did the proper thing and assisted her in removing her coat but frankly it's hard to remember when she's sitting across from him all pale arms and throat and a dress of a colour that bridges the gap between a fresh egg yolk and daffodils. Then Granny marches over with _that _air about her, the no-nonsense kind that suggests matriarch and drill sergeant simultaneously. He never did see why the crossbow was her weapon of choice. She was so much better suited to a battleaxe, surely.

"Evening Belle", she ignores him pettily. He blinks away a sarcastic quip.

"Evening Granny," his beloved beams, "I'll have my usual, and two of your best hamburgers, please"

The old woman crinkles into a smile and he can't help but smirk to himself at the guileless power Belle uses unawares on others. Granny shoots him a withering look and he smiles back as winningly as he knows how.

"Rumple, what are you-"

"Drinking? I know what he has" Granny turns on her heel and saunters off. He watches her depart with barely concealed amusement. The grin fades when he sees the cringe ruining her beautiful smile.

"Oh, Granny!"

The woman turns, all honeydew smiles for his Belle, "Yes Belle?"

She gestures awkwardly at the rose lying on the table, a telltale blush powdering her cheeks.

"Could I get some water to put this in? I don't want it wilting while we eat. Anything will do, a spare glass if you have one"

"Of course, sweetie," and she nods all smiling assent. When Belle turns back to him the old shewolf wastes no time throwing a look that tells him exactly what she thinks of his gift to her, which is apparently not much.

"Granny's scorn is the least of my worries right now," he reassures the vision before him, "Nobody likes their landlord, really"

"Can't say I've had a problem with him, " she purses her lips thoughtfully, eyes glinting delightfully. He laughs under his breath.

This time it's Ruby who returns, a tall glass of water improbably balanced on the tray that is forever and irritatingly set at 45 degrees. She places it in front of Belle, who smiles up at her openly. He doesn't miss the wink of overly made up lashes before she saunters away.

"Allow me"

He reached over and placed the bloom in its new place of honour.

Belle admired the rose in its impromptu vase.

"Is it real or Magic?" she enquires, eyebrow quirking in challenge.

"Magic is real too, you know," he feigns resignment and watches her press her lips together to qualm a grin, "but this one is of the natural variety. I believe you know the seller"

Her face lights up in recognition before her shoulders sink a little.

"You went to see Papa" her voice is quiet, almost dull. He leans further across the table between them, arms folded.

"Hey," her eyes flicker upwards, sad, almost guilty, "he's fine. I may be his landlord but I did pay for my purchase"

She brightens a little at his joke and dislodges the melancholy in a subtle shake of dark waves.

"And are you about to tell me he overcharged you horribly for your custom?"

Rumpelstiltskin leaned back, hands placed peaceably in the air in surrender.

"A gentleman never tells"

He stood expectantly outside Game of Thorns, waiting for the inevitable onslaught of _If you're here for the rent, here, bloody well have it_ or _You're still a monster, Rumpelstiltskin_. Unexpectedly a cool silence greeted him until French emerged from the shop, wiping his big hands on a crumpled handkerchief.

"Rumpelstiltskin"

"French"

The silence was interminable. Rumpelstiltskin glared at the florist from behind the tinted barricade of his sunglasses before her voice resounded in his head _I like your eyes. _He did not for a nanosecond presume that her father would in any way be won over by his unremarkable peepers, but he was here for Belle, after all. Rumpelstiltskin sighed and took them off, slipping them into his coat pocket, squinting in the afternoon light.

"Come to gloat, " the florist stated bluntly.

"On the contrary, I've come to make a purchase," he slowly approached the glowering man, "Are you this congenial with all your customers?"

"I make an effort for a special few," came the predictable retort.

He cast a discerning eye over the assorted blooms before finding what he sought.

"I'll consider myself well-regarded then," he quipped dryly.

French followed his look.

"Is this all the roses you have?"

The florist nodded towards the shop interior.

"Fresh delivery today, more inside". His tired eyes narrowed at the slender man in the dark suit.

"Never had you down as a flower person, never mind roses"

Rumpelstiltskin ignored the jibe, flicking his eyes skyward in irritation when the man turned to motion him towards the rest of his stock.

"I'm not. You've only ever had one rose of any _true _value, Maurice," leaning emphasis on the man's first name and fingering the rubbery leaf of a Calla lily to distract himself from the effort, "and it's for her that I'm giving you patronage"

Maurice regarded him coolly, hands thrust into his worn pockets, shoulders hunched defensively.

"A dozen, is it?"

"Just the one"

_Cheapskate_, he read plain as bold-faced type in the man's burly face.

"I don't sell single stems"

"Then charge me for a full bouquet. I'll pay it"

Maurice muttered something unintelligible to himself before straightening to fix a hostile stare on him.

"Rich bastard. You can more than afford it, can't you"

He barked an amused laugh, "That's one thing I can tolerate about you French. You've never minced your words when it comes to your opinion of me"

The man bristled halfheartedly at that, apparently unsure of whether to be affronted or relieved by his amusement.

"You're still a monster, Rumpelstiltskin"

"So they tell me, " he countered.

The florist plucked a single, perfect specimen from a sea of vermilion and he nodded approval. It wouldn't do to be impolite.

"Ah," is her pitch-perfect response, "so you _have_ resolved to be one this evening"

He fairly beams back at her in reply and she laughs happily again to see the wide smile transform his face. She had thought it a crescent moon once, slender and infrequent. This evening it stands at a generous, unabashed three-quarters and counting.

Afterwards she's not sure if it was the hollow unanimous gasp from the other customers or the horrible tingling sensation at the back of her neck that alerted her, but everything happens so quickly she barely has time to register the figure approaching their booth with confident, swaying steps, arms folded across a black blazer.

_My, my. Have you been counting the days, sweet girl?_

She'd torn threads from the hem of her dress and tied them in knots to keep time, writing materials being thin on the ground. A frightening number of little bows, sailor's knots her Papa had taught her and childish half-braids littered the floor of her cell. Once she'd painstakingly looped the lace trim from her petticoat into the shape of a cursive_ R_ and then spent the next agonizing minutes undoing her work with shaking hands, fearful that if her kisses could break curses what might the work of her hands do to him under _her _roof?

"Well isn't this lovely. The two of you belong on a picture postcard"

He changes before her, warmth replaced by staggering, heavy hate. She shivers despite the almost hot interior. Rumpelstiltskin lifts his eyes to the Queen's face and she swears the pupils cut themselves into sharp slits.

"Romancing your _girl_, Gold? Aren't you a little old for that?"

Belle fought the rising cold in her stomach, fidgeting slightly in what had been a comfortable seat. She looked across at Rumpelstiltskin for reassurance. She could practically see the hackles rising around his shoulders and neck, lips curling back to reveal narrow white teeth suddenly sharper than she remembered. _Crocodile_ she heard him again, spitting, ashamed, vicious. She could see it now in his silent threat and almost feared for Regina's throat should those jaws snap tight around it in attack. She managed to lift her eyes to the countenance that had been her only visitor and nightmare in the long years in Storybrooke's asylum. Just as she remembered, the Queen was as beautiful here as she had been in the old land. Her raven hair was shorter now; crows' wings buffeting glacial cheeks softly, the same intent dark eyes and crimson mouth. The same wintry cold. She forced herself to keep looking and that face, intent on Rumpelstiltskin's suddenly opened, a heavy door wedged ajar. She saw telltale pink around those dark lashes, a barely imperceptible puffiness under coal-black eyes. She reached unseeing across the table to clasp Rumpelstiltskin's hand, its fingers steely despite the loose curl of the fist they made. She fancied he was rehearsing the grip he clearly wanted to press around Regina's neck. Belle struggled to breathe as if underwater.

"It's alright," she heard herself saying, "She's not here for us"

The Queen turned to her, face haughty with pinpricked pride. That too-familiar cruel smile curved and Belle pressed her knees together to stop the quaking in her legs.

"And what exactly am I here for, little housekeeper?"

Belle's foot sought out his under the table. She felt him press back, his eyes still ruthlessly trained on Regina's face. Any second now and Belle half expected a spray of blood should there be a single misstep.

"Interrupting our date won't solve your problems," she said quietly, not trusting her voice to grow any louder without shaking, "and baiting Rumpelstiltskin is _never_ a good idea". She clenched the hand in her lap tightly, nails digging into her palm. Padded walls and clothes that fit someone else resurfaced at the back of her mind. The eternal cycle of time alone. _Stop looking at me_.

"Would you like the Mayor to leave, Belle?" he evenly asked, and politeness has never sounded so dangerously hostile to her ears as now. It's like a knife drawn at a ball, his voice low and so very sharp. She draws her elbows in tight against her rib cage before remembering his aggression is not directed at her. Her visible hand smoothes the top of his, placating. Her stomach heaves.

"I think she's about to. Henry said earlier that he might need some help with his homework". _He's such a good boy_, she thinks painfully, seeing his backpacked figure flitting about the shelves, thirsty for knowledge. Regina's eyes widen a fraction at her boldness and then for one-hundredth of a second Belle sees the woman underneath the dark crown, tense, worried and defensive.

Clearly her spoken afterthought has some effect. The mention of Henry changes something in the air.She fancies with a little Magic and not very much effort another twenty-eight years could have been packed into the taut seconds that follow.

"Have a nice evening, Gold" is the Queen's parting shot, but for all its snarkiness and obvious threat (did she learn that from him too, she wonders) it lacks bite and Belle remind herself with drugged slowness that the Queen is also a mother and alone. She watches him watch her order coffee and leave, eyes trailing the dark figure with uncanny focus, unblinking. The door clangs shut.

"Thank you," she whispers, deflating in the wake of Regina's departure, muscles lax, relieved. He looks at her in open concern.

"Are you sure-"

"Yes," she gulps, returning her other hand to press against the cool tabletop, "She wasn't going to do anything to me"

He grimaces, shoulders rising in delayed discomfort, "If she had-"

"You'd tear her apart?" she finished sadly, "Not for me, Rumple. Besides," sipping gratefully on her iced tea and the drink slips down her throat cold and clear and awakening, "I know how to recognize a girl in trouble"

He snorts disbelievingly, gaze diverting to the window, "She's no mere girl, dearest"

"But she was once, right?" she presses back, searching.

Rumpelstiltskin looked thoughtful. He sighed and the downward turn of his mouth made him look older than he should.

"Yes. Yes," he conceded, "I suppose she was"

Belle patted his hand comfortingly and he clutched it to his lips, pressing a brief kiss on her knuckle, holding it in place as if trying to inhale the faint scent of roses that his gift has left on her fingers.

"You're too good for this place"

She had nothing to say to that and so they sat in silence, hands linked across the table until a waft of something mouthwatering and savoury broke the reverie and persuaded her eyes to momentarily abandon his.

He leans back in his seat, all the better to observe her reaction. Those crystalline blue eyes widen in a mixture of childlike curiosity and hungry anticipation as Granny slides their loaded plates in front of them. She devours the food with her eyes before even looking at the cutlery, only just remembering in the nick of time to graciously thank the old woman and praise the aromas the burgers are trailing.

"So," she deliberates, "how do I go about this? Fork? Knife? Both? Hands?"

He laughs wonderingly at the newness of it all.

"However you see fit. I dare say a knife and fork would prove more ladylike, but don't stand on ceremony for that. Hands are the easiest"

She mimics his grip on the burger with careful concentration and lifts it slowly to her mouth, eyeing the sesame-topped bun as if half expecting it to spring loose from her hold. He watches her over the top of his.

She chews quietly, thoughtfully and then it happens. Her eyes close and open again in delight, smiling into her mouthful in clear enjoyment.

"This," she manages when the first bite is swallowed, "is _amazing_"

He smiles into his own bite, finding himself pondering the flavours with more attention than he's ever paid food in three centuries.

"Why did," she pauses inadvertently when another bite proves to difficult to resist and chews promptly before continuing as a true lady should, "Why did we never think of this in our world? Meat, with bread, and-" she shakes her head in glowing incredulity, "- it's so _juicy_"

He snorts with laughter at that, her open delight suddenly too much. Clearing his throat into his fist and trying to swallow at the same time he realizes his eyes have moistened, a consequence of the laughter she's provoked. A first time for everything then, he thinks to himself, watching her eat with unabashed gusto.

"I do remember being concerned that you'd move out of your apartment and into Granny's," he mused, head cocked. Her hand drops into the water with an audible splash.

"You are _asking _for a soaking," comes the threat from the nymph in his bathtub. His grin is expectant, feline.

"Promises, promises"

Her hands flicks out above the rim of the tub and he ducks the spray of warm droplets flying in his direction.

She peers at him intently, arms folded, a glistening chin balanced lightly on stacked wrists.

"Pass me my towel?"

He reaches for the soft roll of burgundy next to him and unfurls it with a slow flourish.

Outside the door he shrugs into his coat, carelessly throwing the scarf around his neck. The silence between them grows pleasantly and within it they took a few initial steps away from the entrance.

"Is this the part where I try to kiss you?" he ventured, eyes darting sideways at her in a half-cautious, half anticipatory flicker. Belle turned to stand in front of him, hands clasped together.

"Rather presumptuous, so early in the evening"

He exhales incredulity he doesn't feel. She is joking with him again.

"As I recall, it was _you_ who kissed me the other night", he reminds her, index finger wagging in slow motion, "I was merely hoping to return the favour"

She steps closer.

"You may"

He traced the line of her cheek with the back of his hand delicately, as if he feared leaving an imprint on the creamy skin. Belle thought of the forest and _sweetheart_, the Library and _goodbye_ and closed her eyes in trust.

Down, following the line of her jaw to crook neatly under her chin and tilt ever so slightly _up_, her lips to meet his. It's slow, tender, measured, Rumpelstiltskin taking each lip separately between his as if tasting her at his precise leisure, learning her all over again. If he is anxious to be unhurried Belle finds herself suddenly in haste, kissing back determinedly, cradling the back of his head in inexplicably hot fingers that dip into the back of his shirt collar and meet warm skin. She feels him shiver at that and then his hands slide firmly around her waist and she registers with a slight jolt the cold handle of his cane press against the curve of her spine. Leaving his neck briefly she reached behind herself to pry the cane from fingers that loosened immediately at her touch, returning her arm to wind around his shoulders, cane securely in her own grip. He leans slightly forward, as if the absence of the crutch requires a little adjustment in stance and she is glad of it as his mouth bears deeper down onto and into hers, drinking her in and feeding the hot blush that warms her throat and glows a path down inside her. _To the cockles of your heart_, she dazedly recalled one of the kitchen maids telling her of the hot soup she ladled into earthen bowls and that warmth, nurturing, steaming, _hot _fills her now. If her heart does indeed have cockles they must be singing, she thinks, half-lucid.

The spell is briefly broken as he pauses for air.

"_Belle,"_ he breathes, voice a low whisper that makes her toes squeal together inside her boots and then they both belatedly realize the scene they're making outside of Granny's as disbelieving eyes gape on at them from behind the cheery glass. A few curious noses even strain through the small slats afforded by the blinds. She does not have to look to see the pursed line of faint disapproval on Granny's face and the small, secretive smile on Ruby's.

Belle dipped her head into the refuge where his shoulder met his neck in embarrassment and felt without seeing the daggers he shot towards their captive audience.

"Stop glaring", she mumbled into his scarf.

"I'm not glaring," and she can _feel_ the slow, wicked smile in his voice without looking.

"You are," snuggling against him, night air and his own indefinable spice clinging to him, "you can't lie to _me_, Rumpelstiltskin, I will always find you out"

She lifts her head finally, a charming blush tinting her cheeks, eyes sparkling and he relents. Turning to the diner, he bows to the spectators with an ironic flourish before presenting his arm to her again. She takes it.

"Walk me home?"

"It will be my pleasure"

He very nearly starts when her grip on his arm tightens with unexpected speed. Her eyes are alarmingly wide.

"My rose! I almost forgot!"

And off she goes, dashing back into Granny's in a flurry of dark hair and yellow gold.

He wraps her in the heavy towel, draping it over her shoulders as she gives her back to him; his hands following the folds round to pad at her damp arms. She turns to face him and he stops, mesmerized by the perfect, erratic stream a wayward drop is weaving down her throat, into the dip at her collarbone and still further down. She darts a soft, vaguely damp kiss onto his mouth when he's distracted and he catches her, winding arms around her towel-clad form and chasing the elusive heat of her mouth as she shivers in the relative coolness. They both hear the gradual roll of his cane sliding from its precarious standing propped against the bath and laugh into each other's kisses at the final clatter as it hits the floor.

"You were quite the gentleman that night," she murmurs into his hair.

"Was I?" stroking her back languidly, "It's all gone downhill since, then"

He feels her smile against his jaw, "I don't mind"

Belle skittered back inside the entrance, stopping abruptly to comb a stray lock behind her ear when curious glances turned towards the door she'd flung open in haste. She spied the rose and plucked it swiftly from the glass, lifting it in explanation when Granny's head jerked in her direction from behind the register. Belle beamed, breathless, sheepish. She turned to exit the diner again, slower this time, unhurried, her precious bloom clutched between thumb and index finger, petals brushing her jaw. Then she heard them. Voices hushed, unsettling.

_What she's doing with him I will never know He's probably a financial crutch Do you think she made a Deal with him Can't have been worth it Of all the people in Storybrooke And she's such a sweet girl Must be ransom for something, someone What a monster-_

Belle stopped, inches from the door, and turned around. She looked pointedly at the people hunched in the booths, those sat at the tiny centre tables, searching out eyes that instantly, guiltily avoided hers. Heads shook with tiresome knowing as their owners looked away. She bit her lip. Her voice sounded louder than she initially meant it to.

"He's a _person_, you know"

A few surprised faces jerked her way in unintended reaction. She stared back, something fierce growing inside her chest that had lain dormant since the day she walked out of his dungeon, face hot with sharp sadness and frustrated anger. Farmers, peddlers, disgraced knights, assorted animals and a host of ordinary people with their own foibles and shortcomings stared back. Granny's expression was unreadable. She heard a whispered _asylum _from one corner and ignored its origins.

"Are any of us really what we seem?"

She scanned the room hotly. Silence prevailed until Ruby helpfully deposited a stack of plates on the counter with a declarative clatter. Belle pressed her lips together to stop the trembling and the more explosive, erratic verbal barrage threatening to come roaring out of her tight throat. She left.

Rumpelstiltskin stood a comfortable distance from the diner, looking out across the darkened main street. In the white disc of light the streetlamp housed him in his profile was sharp, dramatic, like the cutout figure from the paper lanterns they'd sold at market to mark the solstice and the coming of autumn. Hypnotized instantly by the tiger stripes of black and gold they painted on every surface she'd stood perfectly still, the tiny flames within each one prey to the evening breeze but somehow, Magically enduring. She'd begged one from Papa that year and sat enraptured in her bed when a single candle cast fantastical shadows on her bedroom wall, a gaunt figure flickering against the curtains, legs akimbo as though mid-stride to some unknown land. Belle stared, breath hurried as though she'd just run a mile. Then he turned, angular face softening in recognition and affection, brown eyes dropping to the rose shivering in her too-tight fist. She swallowed, chest full, aching.

"That was close," he smiled, a glint of gold that was there and gone as she watched his lips move. A wry, beloved smile. She smiled back, restoring her hand's easy grip on his arm, leaning her head on his shoulder as they walked slowly down the quiet street.

"Thank you for my hamburger"

"You're most welcome"


	8. Courage

DISCLAIMER: Happy New Year all! Sorry it's taken so long, I went home for the Christmas season and work has been very busy since I've gotten back. I do not own OUAT or Rumbelle, however much I wish I did. And Japan, still with the no OUAT broadcasts. Seriously, if I did not love you as much as I do, we would have issues. This chapter is set post 2x08.

8.

The day, with all its hopes and happy anticipations fell somewhat short. Belle worried her lip in the wake of Regina's departure, mentally kicking herself on inviting him out for a second hamburger, a lunch invitation this time. It had been purely on impulse and they'd beamed at each other like children when he'd accepted. Then the Queen had made her appearance and this time round the bravery and bravado that had risen inside her when she'd interrupted their time together that first evening went running for the hills screaming.

_This time you have a weakness. _

No, Belle shook her head, horrified at the notion; this would not do at all.

They ate in silence and left in the same fashion, Belle suddenly small and fragile, clinging to his jacket sleeve as he walked her home. The mood sat heavy and brooding despite the sunny day. We have a storm cloud for a parasol, Belle thought miserably, and there is so much rain coming. She stole a look at her True Love and her heart sank further still. Rumpelstiltskin's face was shuttered, his jaw set in iron gridlock, his eyes focused on something so very far away from her.

_I won, in the end._

There was so much to ask. What did she know, really? Belle fisted her hands in the material. Tell me, she thought, how was he supposed to tell me everything? She bit her lip again, the enormity of what she'd asked him sinking leaden in her thoughts.

"You'll draw blood if you keep doing that"

Belle looked up and her heart rose a little from the abyss it had been descending grimly into. Yes, she thought, smiling in spite of the mood, that's more like it. _Her _Rumpelstiltskin was looking at her, eyes crinkling slightly, a faint smile on his mouth and whisky brown warmth in eyes that had been distant and cool.

"You'd know all about that sort of thing, wouldn't you," she returned, smoothing the wrinkles she'd wrung into his sleeve and looking up from lowered lashes. Something in his gaze crackled into flame at her words and she knew then he understood exactly what she was referring to.

He walked her home after their first glorious date, all the way to her apartment door to watch her unlock it (landlord's prerogative and other words to that effect). They'd kissed again, inevitably, the key dangling in the lock as she realized how terribly, terribly _hungry_ they were, a hunger that had very little to do with hamburgers or any number of sides. He'd kissed her back with fierce desperation, long fingers combing her hair in haphazard, unplanned strokes and she'd answered in kind, only half-surprised at her own aggression.

So long without each other. So very long.

It was only when she'd pulled back sharply, the intensity of the kiss blurring with brief, intimate pain that they halted, gasping for breath. His face was alight with want, features near-feral in the shadows, all eyes and mouth devouring her and Belle looked back, skin prickling with lightning. They watched each other with bated breath, chests heaving and it was then Belle felt the moisture over her lower lip and realized that it was bleeding.

Her beloved's face crumbled into apology, but she only reached for him again, fingers smoothing his jaw and let him softly _softly _lap at the tiny wound, his tongue warm and feline over her delicate flesh and they both whimpered into the assault. Arms could never be tight enough around each other.

"Who's Cora?" she finally ventured again when they reached her door.

Rumpelstiltskin let out a heavy sigh, eyes at his feet, uncertain.

"Someone I should have dealt with a long time ago"

"A witch?" she prompted, "like – Regina?" still hesitant over her captor's name. He shook his head dismissively.

"Worse"

Belle shivered in spite of herself, "How does she know Cora?" Former friends? She brainstormed, rivals?

"She's her mother," came the startling reply, hissed through clamped teeth.

"Her mother?" Belle echoed blankly, time and numbers not quite meeting agreement in her head, "But-"

He forced a lopsided smile.

"I am a few_ hundred_ years older than you, dearest"

She blinked in response, sheepish.

"Sorry. It's very easy to forget," hugging his arm.

"Oho," he huffed, a melancholy rendition of his usual chuckle, "Carry on like that and I'll start thinking you're after something"

"Maybe I am," she pressed back, a little of her boldness ebbing back to her in little waves, "Something like the rest of your story, perhaps?"

He caught his breath and she could practically see the effort to articulate centuries of history into concise, small words. Her True Love, striving to do as she bid. And it dawned then, that a small step, one foot before the other, was just as important as a long stride.

"How about this," she offered, feeling his dilemma as acutely as if it were her own, "I'll make you a deal. Before the end of the week, you can tell me _three_ things about yourself before we met, three chapters of your story if you like. You can choose which things you want to tell me, I won't make requests"

Rumpelstiltskin looked both thoughtful and uneasy.

"You're giving me rather a lot of freedom in this, aren't you? I _can_ choose what I want to tell you and you_ will _not ask for specifics? I might reveal any sort of mundane triviality"

She secreted away the smile prompted by the fan-spread of theatrical fingers that accompanied his misgiving.

"As if anything about you could be mundane or trivial," she tossed back, head tilted to one side. His mouth quirked, puzzled. Belle lifted her chin in challenge.

"Ask me for something in return. I don't expect anything to be one-sided between us, Rumple. Ask me for _three_ things in return if you like, to balance the scales evenly"

Rumpelstiltskin was totally silent, the only movement the harried thoughts behind his eyes. Belle willed herself into relaxed calm. Whatever he requested she was ready to consider and prepared to give. She had been since the day she said the words that had bound them together in the first place. He stepped closer, ensnaring a loose curl in his finger. When he did speak his voice was quiet, low, for her ears alone.

"Stay _exactly_ as you are, Belle. Brave, _good_ and inherently beautiful. Do that, and you will find me more than content"

She blinked back tears. Would anyone believe her if she said the Dark One had named as his price something she did not apply effort or thought to in doing; simply to be? Clearing her throat she grasped his hand tightly in agreement.

"Deal"

He eyed her seriously, fingers tight around hers. Warning.

"I might have asked for any number of things, dearest. I might have asked for your ignorance, your loyalty, your love, with forever thrown into the bargain"

Belle cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Well, that would have been equally generous. You have two of those things already"

His brows rose this time in humbled delight.

"Although ignorance? You would've had to bargain very hard with me for that," she mused, "I don't like being kept in the dark"

_Anything she has to say won't be a secret from you._

"I'll bear that in mind," he resolved, eyes flickering to hers for permission before planting a soft kiss on her waiting mouth.

It's 7:25 in the morning and there's no one else in Granny's. It's oddly peaceful sitting in the diner like this, she reflects, no hustle and chatter, just the quite hum of the lights and Ruby's heels clacking quietly somewhere in the kitchen. She's also unusually nervous. His note, an archaically beautiful scrawl left propped up on the Library desk was unexpected in its promptness, so soon after their last conversation. That he'd named as their meeting place the diner of a woman who had nothing good to say about him and made that public every time he visited spoke volumes to Belle.

She was going to learn something today, and anticipation and dread began a tipsy dance in her stomach, the two waltzing dizzily in unending circles. When his familiar step sounded at the entrance Belle looked up, the smile a reflex, prompting his own as he lowered himself with practiced ease into the seat opposite her.

"Hey"

"Hey"

He gestured vaguely at the bare table.

"You're not drinking any tea?"

"I haven't ordered anything yet," she admitted, an inexplicable blush colouring her cheeks, "But don't get me anything," she insisted urgently, "I'm here. To listen"

He clasped his hands together on the table, shifting slightly forward and she unthinkingly echoed his movements, their two figures like facing cameos from old portraits.

"I was thirteen when my leg became the encumbrance it is now," he began, and Belle blinked.

She'd been expecting a follow-on from her questions about Cora, or perhaps something relating to his association with the Queen. This opening caught her completely off-guard. Nerves prickling, she leant forward further still, her story-lover's senses jolted into increased awareness of the newness of the tale she was about to hear. The white hue of his knuckles gave the lie to the casual delivery of his words and Belle smiled encouragingly, her own palms hot against each other, tingling in expectation.

It had been their first night together; her first night outside of the asylum when she'd had that initial glimpse of his scars. Emerging shyly from the bathroom, strangely comfortable in one of what he'd called 'old' shirts and a pair of loose, soft trousers (pyjamas, that had been a new word), she found him sat on what would be their bed. The injured leg, bent at the knee, bare foot planted on the mattress and pyjama leg rolled up was exposed to the glow of the bedside lamp.

"Does it hurt very much?"

His head jerked up at her soft inquiry and his eyes said what his lips could not articulate in taking her in.

"I'm used to it"

Her forehead puckered in concern. Slowly she made her way round to his side of the bed, hugging her arms around the shirt he'd given her.

"Can, can I see it?"

Those eyes widened in blank incomprehension before he left off his inspection and sat back somewhat awkwardly, hands preoccupied with each other, unsettled in his lap.

Belle lowered her gaze to his knee and swallowed.

A ghostly lattice of crisscrossing lines, wriggling in uncertain cords tattooed his knee and some of the area above and below the joint. Faded pink like worn satin, they formed an odd pointelle on skin that was otherwise a light beech. She reached without thinking, fingers spread to press against the scar tissue, tracing the raised skin and finding it unnaturally smooth to the touch. Their appearance alone told the jagged, crushing pain of their birth. She winced at what awful accident could have constructed the gridwork on Rumpelstiltskin's leg and only looked up to meet his eyes when he let out a shuddering, embarrassed sigh.

"Belle, are you sure about this? There are more guest bedrooms, more sofas in this house than I need, if you want, I'll be more than happy to sleep-"

"With me," she managed, the words a husky gulp, vocal chords only just readjusting to all this _talking_, "- if it's alright? I'm not sure how this world-" she struggled to find words _conduct, etiquette, propriety_, "I've had rather too much time by myself, lately"

His mouth wavered at that and then he nodded briskly, drawing back the heavy duvet, eyes darting too-quickly to hers, anxious, waiting.

The breeze was stronger here, more playful, more boisterous. His legs dangled in space, his hair blew into his eyes. Beneath his palms and thighs the bark was tough, gnarled, reassuringly solid. Above him only the highest, most slender branches that even a cat would hesitate to test. The dog's incessant barking drew his eyes earthward, down from the blanket spread of fields and open, promising sky. He grinned happily at the sheepdog, a piebald mess of hair, front paws raised to the trunk with no hope of climbing.

"Sorry boy, I'll be up here a while longer"

The dog whined, a keening, self-pitying sound. He turned back to the sky. Birds were darting across the blue, dark arrowheads against the rolling clouds. Something was going on in the village. On the small stone bridge that crossed the stream and connected the outside world large carts were toiling, dark blocks moving almost in slow motion. He frowned.

"You can climb trees. We get it. It's old already"

He blinked. The girl at the foot of the tree stood legs akimbo, a thick shock of dark hair tousled by rough play. He climbed quickly down, thin legs moving swiftly, lightly over the knotted bark.

"Milah!"

The girl sniffed imperiously. "Bet you can't do what the other boys are doing"

"And what's that?"

He stooped to ruffle the sheepdog's floppy ears affectionately. Blue eyes glittered with excitement. She tightened the sash tied jauntily around her growing hips. She threw a discerning look at his tunic.

"Your shirt's torn"

He studied the garment. Too big, this tunic was, one of Father's old ones. The sleeves had been trimmed so as not to dwarf his arms but the hem trailed if not secured with a belt. He fingered the ragged hem. Milah clapped her hands decisively.

"Follow me!"

They ran, leaping through the as-yet unmown long grass, thin blades brushing bare ankles. When green met the dust of the road leading to the bridge she stopped abruptly, pointing a somewhat grubby finger at the carts looming ahead.

"Over there. It's a new game and _so_ dangerous!" her eyes flashed, "They're so quick at it too"

He squinted in the midday sun, following the line of her finger until he saw flashes of movement between the massive wheels, dark shadows larger than the birds he'd been following from his favourite perch. As his eyes adjusted to the glare he saw that the shadows were figures, scuttling between the giant wheels, stopping for less than a second to grasp at something small and glittering in the dust.

The carts were huge, larger than any he'd ever seen passing through their tiny village. Their wheels were oak and iron and their cargo was concealed. He frowned in suspicion, the forbidden word _Ogres_ forming unbidden on his tongue. Father said there had been trouble. Something stirring in the forest. Fear in muttered conversations he was supposed to have been too deeply asleep to hear snatches of.

"What do you think they're carrying?" he asked aloud.

"Who knows?" Milah shrugged unfazed, "Anyway, are you going to try it? You get to keep the marbles if you can take them. They're real glass, all the way from Avonlea"

He looked in her eyes, bright with anticipation. The last time he'd had that look sent in his direction he'd climbed the poplar at the edge of the forest to snatch an egg from the next in its highest branches. She fiddled with the sash, worrying the worn tassels with exaggerated deliberation.

"I still have the egg you know. It's still that nice colour. Matches my eyes"

The carts rumbled by, their wheels like slow thunder.

Belle's face was tense, her eyes narrowed in an empathic wince. She knew what was coming.

"And…" she fumbled for words. He managed a rueful half-smile.

"And I did. I tried my hand at the game the other boys were so good at," he scrutinized his knuckles, brow crinkling at the memory, "I was not so quick"

Fear ran cold through his veins despite the hot sun. Suddenly he was conscious of his thin legs, ankles trembling, somehow uncertain. _Spindleshanks_, some of the older boys had called him once. He hadn't liked it. Milah had laughed at it, stopping when he looked at her. She had never laughed at it again since.

He sprang. The nearest cart towered dark and foreboding above him as he scrambled in the dust on shaking legs. Forward, forward. Under the next carriage he scuttled quickly, eyes darting frantically for the marbles thrown in challenge into their path. Sweat beaded at his temples in shocked relief when he realized the cart above him had stopped. Nervous fingers reached for the shining globes in the dirt. A vivid green marble slipped cool into his damp palms. The cart rumbled, its wheels creaking in obvious warning of onward movement.

One more.

A tiny ball, smaller than its compatriots. Sparkling and light blue, a cat's eye. _Milah._

He reached and the prize was his. On his knees in the sand-coloured dust he felt for the floor of the cart above his head and shuffled awkwardly into a crouched position. There was another cart ahead of this one to dodge, but if he was quick enough he could slide between the wheels of that one too and be on the other side of the road in no time. He readied himself behind the spokes of one gigantic wheel. _I can do this._

He moved.

The wheels turned.

Afterwards he felt, as he had not in the instance it happened, the bright spurt of elation in his dart forward, knowing he was out from under one of the unseeing behemoths and so close to his goal.

In the moment all he knew was panic and the crushing, splintering pain that exploded behind his eyelids and rendered him incapable of anything but screams, on his back in the dust. Afterwards and every day that followed he woke knowing he would never climb the poplar again.

Rumplestiltskin sighed heavily.

"It was my tunic, you see. That too-long hem caught in the wheels and dragged me back under. I only saw the wheel coming towards me when it was too late. So _huge_, as big as a dining table, or so it seemed at the time. When I finally awoke, my leg was a mess of splints and bandages and Milah was gone. They'd sent her away to an aunt's in a neighbouring village. Punishment for roping me into the game we should not have been playing"

Belle's face, when he finally lifted his head to meet her gaze, was awash with tears. He reached for her over the table in the exact instant that she scrambled upright and scurried round to his side of the booth, nearly crushing him against the wall as she threw her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his neck, quietly sobbing. He held her gently as she sniffled into his collar, ignoring Granny's silent threat of imminent and painful death as she passed them to refill the coffee pot.

"It's alright love. It's an old story from a long time ago. I'd very nearly forgotten it"

Belle looked up, her eyes watery with brimming tears.

"You were so young. It's such a horrible thing to have to suffer, I don't know if I could have coped"

He shook his head, wiping an errant tear away from her cheek.

"No use crying over it, sweetheart. What's done is done"

He was still holding her when her tears subsided and she rubbed a warm hand against his chest in silent comfort, when the door opened to let another customer in. Belle looked up in reflex, wary of another unwanted appearance from Regina.

The tall woman, a polished badge at her hip and tumbling blonde hair like a princess's fixed her beloved a stern, knowing look as she passed on route to order coffee. Rumpelstiltskin smiled back, clearly amused at the cool reception.

"Don't worry about the Sheriff, we've-"

"A complicated relationship?" Belle surmised.

"Precisely. And that's a story for another day, or month" he finished, stage-frowning into his drink.

"I look forward to it," she replied, conjuring a short giggle at the harassed look that gave way to an oblique half-smile.

Days passed.

"It'll be a rather brief tale this time," he muttered, shoulders unsettled under his jacket, his whole stance radiating quiet apprehension.

Belle looked up from her work, rising from her seat behind the desk. She opened her mouth to suggest they meet another time but before the words came he shook his head abruptly.

"Of all the people I could undertake the closing of a portal with," he trailed off uncharacteristically, sneering, "can't keep her Majesty waiting though"

Belle attempted a sympathetic smile.

"Are you really going to close it?"

Rumpelstiltskin looked at her, the uncannily penetrating look of old searching her features.

"I will _not_ have Cora tear this world apart," he vowed under his breath, "not when I have so much here to protect"

Belle nodded silently, waving him over to their corner.

"You must understand the differences first," he began, hunched over his knees, hands clasped as though thinking through the legal jargon of a particularly delicate contract, "I inherited, you might say, my powers. Dark Magic came to me from the outside in. Cora," even now his voice grated over the hated name, "like her daughter after her, was born with hers. I took her on to school that talent into something I could wield"

Belle drew the line across the dots, acknowledging his words, the spoken and the unsaid. The Dark Curse. Baelfire.

"She was young then, " he continued, "headstrong, ambitious, thirsty for more of the power I helped discipline", he shook his head at the memory, "I underestimated the last part. She grew quickly in power and ambition, and one day that desire led her to take me on, breaking all the promises she'd agreed to in allowing me to teach her. Defeating, _killing_ the Dark One," he scowled, "the ultimate proof of absolute power, for she wanted the unique abilities that came with my title too"

The Library itself seemed intent on his every word, willed into silence. What tomes he could fill, she wondered, hundreds of volumes marked _Reader, beware_. Belle cleared her throat.

"But you defeated her," a half question.

"Oh yes," he conceded, eyebrows arching briefly as though it were news to him too, "but it was closer than I would have liked"

_That's not how she tells the story_, Belle remembered, and her chest tightened.

"But you didn't kill her"

Rumpelstiltskin straightened, tapping his cane absentmindedly on the floor, his back a perfect ramrod.

"No, more's the pity". Cora defiant, even on her knees before him, eyes murderous, mouth bloody with the force of his attack and her own exertions. So thoughtless, even of her own body and that growing inside it. If ever a woman could spit fire, he'd dimly thought then, and this one literally could. He'd had a dragon on a leash, and a collar means nothing once the fire becomes hot enough.

"I made her a deal. Something to keep her under control"

Belle looked puzzled. "But you said that she broke her promises"

"Oh, I managed to coax one from her that she would do well to keep in order to continue possessing a head. A child. Her firstborn"

"Regina," Belle concluded, her mind racing to understand the logic, pieces clicking into place, "A life for a life"

"She was promised to me. When time proved my theory right that she would inherit her mother's aptitude for Magic, I had my replacement, my means to set in the motion the Curse that would bring me here, to the world where Bae was"

"And you were told she'd died. Cora"

"There were infinite things I had to teach her," he bared his teeth, glowering at nothing, "and clearly she put them to good use if even her own daughter believed her dead"

He stood then, straightening his suit jacket with the air of one about to head back to work rather than potentially do battle. Perhaps that is his work too, Belle reasoned. To plan sieges, negotiate terms, create chessboards of entire worlds, to wage war with and against mortals and Magic.

_I have to break this new Curse._

Clearly her eyes spoke her worry as he rubbed her elbow awkwardly when she rose, brushing off her skirt, his head downcast.

"Don't worry. I'm a very old, very bad penny, " he quipped, "I'll be back to regale you with more tales of darkness and woe"

She frowned, fussing over an already perfect tie knot.

"_Be careful_," she warned, "I'll never forgive you if you come back to me in pieces"

"I won't"

He didn't, although the sore head he'd given Ruby gave her cause enough to purse her lips disapprovingly when he emerged from the back of his shop the following day.

"And how is our lupine friend?" he inquired, reading the accusation in her eyes.

"Ruby says she fine," his beloved confirmed, "but the bump on the back of her head feels like a robin's egg"

"Ah," he conceded, leaning on the register, "Wolves have thick skulls, I wouldn't worry"

"_You_ wouldn't," Belle shot back, privately noting his use of 'our' in relation to her first friend in Storybrooke and inwardly smiling, "I'm not accustomed to having my friends hurled about"

He froze, eyeing her with a long, neutral look.

"Would you like me to apologize to Miss Lucas?" he asked evenly.

Belle found her mouth empty of a prompt response. Stumped by his question, she looked at her hands. He was really offering to apologize, should she so desire him to, despite the obvious consequence being Granny's magnified contempt. She would never let go of an apology from Rumpelstiltskin. Belle wrinkled her forehead in thought.

"I'll think about it. Am I here to be told the last of these three chapters?"

"Let's have tea first, " he beckoned.

At last, once their first cups had been drained and their seconds poured hot from the china teapot, he began.

"You know now that Regina was my apprentice of sorts, as was her mother before her"

Belle nodded confirmation.

"You made me admit it that night, " he smiled, tiredness in his eyes and she resisted the urge to pet his hair, too smooth away the lines of fatigue.

"She _was_ a girl once. Articulate, idealistic," he paused, considering the Queen as if she were quite a new concept to him, editing his choice of adjectives along the way, "and heartbroken. I offered to teach her Magic and she refused. She was aware of the danger, though she already loved the idea, _the sensation_, but-" he circled her chipped cup in his hands, "she was afraid. Of what Magic could to the wielder, and she'd had her fill, I suppose, with Cora for a mother"

Belle weighed his words carefully, "In spite of that, she still came to you in the end, though"

"Someone once told me that anger is one of the most natural emotions between a parent and child. What's between those two paragons of womanhood goes far beyond simple anger"

Rumpelstiltskin sighed heavily, "Never underestimate what a heart robbed of True Love is capable of doing, Belle," he stressed pointedly, "I saw the state hers was in as plain as day. I," and here his pace slowed, "_used_ it to my advantage."

The room was quiet.

"You're not going to ask for more details than that?"

Belle shrugged. "That was part of our deal. I keep my promises"

They sat in total silence. Tense minutes passed. Then Rumpelstiltskin held up an index finger and wordlessly nodded assent.

"Did you teach her to take hearts?"

It was a damning question and she knew it the moment it left her lips. Rumpelstiltskin looked at his hands, grimly locked into one another. When his eyes met hers again they were dog-weary and waiting for rebuke.

"Yes," came the soft answer. Belle felt acutely, almost _saw _the air leave her body.

"It was a unicorn," he added, with the air of someone recalling a childhood pet, "She didn't want to take it. She hesitated. I told her nothing was innocent," hands released each other, fingers pointing resignedly skyward, "it wasn't too long after that she took a heart without hesitation."

A half-hearted shrug.

Belle's expression was grave.

"Well," she deliberated, "I think I would have questioned _that_. It _is_ possible to stand up to you"

"I think you would have, dearest," reaching for her, rubbing the back of her hand with his palm, "because you have _courage_. Always remember that," he insisted, fingers curling around hers as if to imprint the sentiment into her flesh, "you are stronger than she is"

Belle fidgeted, not quite convinced.

"Well I don't know about that. If it ever came to blows I'm pretty sure I know who would win, Dark Magic powers and all," she smiled ruefully, still colouring prettily from his compliment, "but I can be a pretty mean hair puller"

"Well I can testify to that," he agreed, eyes darkening in lusty recollection. She pinched his hand gently.

"Thank you," she murmured.

Many paths, she remembered, and all of them dark. Belle exhaled slowly, limbs heavy with fatigue she had no business feeling, dull as if from running doggedly for miles. Regina's words took on a new resonance now_ I would know_. She felt as if _she_ had traveled those roads instead, lonely, thorn-riddled, treacherous, quagmires and pits to the unaware. But then a small figure she would not know even on sight cleared the phantom brambles, if only a little.

There was a child at the beginning, middle and end of this, she resolved, a child for whose sake a father did unthinkable, indefensible things in the name of reconciliation and parental love. Her eyes widened, clarity hitting home with the force of a battle ram and she chewed at her lip.

"Have I horrified you enough for one week?" he weakly joked, looking like a man waiting on the noose to circle his neck.

"It wasn't just anger towards Regina, was it?" she faced him directly, "The night you sent the Wraith. You were angry at yourself too, for sending me away and giving her the chance to abduct me"

Rumpelstiltskin's face quivered in confirmation, a subtle, there-and-gone ripple that to the unskilled eye was less than perceptible. Belle felt it like a tidal wave. His eyes were saucers, trembling on spindly balancing rods.

"If I had thought for one second that she would use those powers against you-"

"But you didn't," Belle finished succinctly, "You couldn't".

She tapped an ink blue nail on the rim of her cup.

"You didn't mean to fall in love with me, did you?"

_I wasn't asking if she was engaged._

He looked stricken.

"_No_," he whispered, a deathbed confession, unexpected relief awash on his features, "but I'm so very glad I did"

She crumbled at that, circumnavigating the side table and practically collapsing into his lap with no thought for his leg or the delicate pleats ironed painstakingly into her dress.

"I'm glad too," she whispered into his hair and Rumpelstiltskin hugged her fiercely, possessively, like she was a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. Quiqueg's coffin to Ishmael, her bibliophilic mind leaping to draw parallels to her latest discovery before reason intervened, objecting to the morbid tone of the image. A chill sank deep into her stomach and Belle squeezed her arms tighter around him, sheltering_. I will not be a coffin for him_, she thought ferociously, _I will not be the death of him._

"I love you," she breathed firmly into his ear and his grip on her waist tightened reflexively.

"Darling Belle," he breathed in return, "I love you more"


	9. Roses

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing, alas and lackaday. This is set pre- and post 2x12 – seriously, if people's gifs on Tumblr are going to set my tear ducts off like this, God help me when I actually get to watch the episode in its entirety. Reviews are always, always welcome and much appreciated! Please keep them coming!

9.

She can't help herself and stoops to sniff the perfectly crimson roses outside her father's shop. Velvety soft petals beautifully curled into one another brushed the tip of her nose and Belle inhaled with delight the perfume they offered up to her curious senses.

"They're called Hybrid Tea," a gruff voice prompted from the doorway. Belle smiled to herself at the aptness of it all. The very same bloom that Rumpelstiltskin had first presented her with and already in name alone it tied so many things about their relationship together. She straightened, finding her father hunched nervously in the doorframe, a huge container of fresh white tulips clutched to his chest. Belle eyed the snowy blooms in mild surprise. White tulips._ Forgiveness_, she recalled a childhood memory, pouring over the meanings of flowers in old worn texts that had belonged to her mother.

"Hello, Papa"

Maurice's face crumpled into wet relief.

"Oh Belle", he deposited the container safely on the floor, "darling, I thought I'd never hear you say that again"

She winced at the obvious pain and gratitude in his face. Perhaps she had left it too long to approach him again, metaphorical olive branch aloft. She'd taken less time to reconcile with Rumple, her overactive conscience reproached her, and here was her beloved Papa, desperate for her forgiveness while she'd been spending long afternoons and early mornings with his overzealous landlord. The kiss she'd pressed to his lean cheek on impulse that night came back with a vengeance and her cheeks flushed with sudden heat the winter cold could not prevent.

She stepped inside the shop, opening her arms for a long-overdue embrace and Maurice wrapped her emphatically into a bear-hug, the kind she'd been spoiled with since her earliest days, near-crushed against his barrel chest, hands striving to encompass his increasingly round middle.

"I'm so sorry darling", he breathed into her hair, "I'm so very sorry"

Her eyes watered and it was not from the tightness of his hold. _You would have taken my memories_, she thought suddenly, angrily, _you would have left me nothing but all those years alone and thought it kindness_. She clutched at his overcoat tightly, hands fisting in the material, _and you raised me so well by yourself I never thought to miss the mother I never knew, never knew anything but love._

"I know Papa," she whispered, "I know"

They drew apart, suddenly awkward. Maurice rubbed his large hands together, his breath misting the crisp air.

"You're off to work then?" he ventured, blue eyes darting to hers, "it's not as cold in the Library as it is in here, I hope?"

Belle smiled winningly, "It's very toasty, and I have plenty of books to occupy me when business is slow"

Maurice managed a wobbly smile.

"Still in love with your books then, " he murmured, shaking his head, "time was I worried you'd never leave them alone, carrying one everywhere you went, some of them bigger than you were"

Laughter bubbled up springlike in her throat at the image. Tottering, clutching a gigantic volume to her small child's chest, unable to relinquish hold to steady herself on the wall to descend the stone steps, caught suddenly in big hands and whirled aloft, squealing, Papa tossing her and her precious cargo into air as if the both of them weighed less than a feather.

"Some things never change, " she agreed. Maurice wiped his damp fingers with a tattered cloth from his pocket, eyes downcast.

"Some things do. I should never have done what I did to you, darling. Twenty-eight years spent here without my little girl and the first thing I did was nearly take the years we'd had together away from you", Maurice sniffed, nose very nearly as vermilion as his roses, "You must have been terrified"

Belle nodded confirmation, "I was. I didn't want to lose my memories. All of them, good and bad, all of them are precious to me. All of them make me who I am, and I like who I am"

Maurice searched her face carefully, "And you…you still like him?"

She touched her gloved hand to his callused one.

"I do, Papa. I didn't explain it very well the last time, but then you didn't give me an opportunity to. It wasn't Rumple who had me locked up in the asylum all these years. It was Regina. She abducted me"

Her father's eyes widened in shock and his hands clutched at each other in the familiar gesture of guilt she'd almost forgotten he used.

"But, but how?" he spluttered, paternal worry and disbelief crinkling his ruddy features, "Out from under the Dark One's nose? It's impossible, why, it's-"

She squeezed his hand comfortingly.

"He let me go, Papa," she insisted gently, "sent me away. That's when she captured me"

Maurice's face darkened.

"I don't know whether to be impressed that he set you free or damned furious that he let you walk into that bloody woman's clutches," he finally growled. Belle shrugged in agreement.

"He's not all you think he is, Papa"

Maurice rubbed his daughter's shoulders briskly, whether to warm himself or her Belle could not decide.

"Well the rent hasn't gone up since you came back, that's one thing I can say for him," he reluctantly admitted, crouching to reposition the container of tulips away from the entrance. Belle bent to assist him and together they manouvered the flowers to a more visible spot. Maurice clapped his hands together on straightening, surveying his daughter with obvious emotion and pride.

"There's a lot of bad blood between us, my girl," he warned, "That day he pointed his finger at you and named you as his price my heart nearly stopped in my chest. I still think he's unworthy of you"

"Well in that you and he will find yourselves in agreement", she countered, "maybe that can be your starting point"

Maurice huffed skeptically. Belle checked her watch, mindful of the passing of time.

"I have to go. Don't get cold in here Papa," she eyed his rapidly reddening hands, "and wear gloves, how many times do I have to tell you? Your fingers will freeze and drop off"

Maurice boomed a laugh skyward, "Still lecturing your old man on how to take care of himself, eh?" he patted the doorframe, suddenly quiet, morose, "Next time tell him how to take better care of you. I really thought you'd never want to see me again after what happened in the mine"

Belle sighed in cheerful exasperation, "So did I, for a while," she confirmed, "but anger isn't a very helpful emotion, and you're still my Papa. However misguided and very, _very_ wrong you were to try to control my life and decisions, I know that choice came from a good place. You wanted to protect me, but I can learn to protect myself. I can learn from my own mistakes," she paused in front of the roses, "and Rumpelstiltskin isn't one of them"

Maurice listened in total silence, waiting patiently for her to finish her speech. Clearing his throat he reached for her sheepishly, rubbing her arm through her sunny-hued winter coat.

"Like marigolds", he muttered, half to himself. Belle fingered the cuff of her coat smilingly. She'd been rather pleased with her first winter purchase too. _That colour! _Ruby had exclaimed, _it's amazing on you_.

"You'll come by again, sometime? I've always got a free bouquet for my little girl"

Belle touched his elbow softly.

"I will, Papa"

The sky overhead promised much with feather soft clouds on a turquoise background. Belle hummed to herself as she walked sprightly to work. Later she would find a large arrangement of the very same white tulips perched happily on her desk after coming back from her lunch break. Now, a single red rose bloomed slowly in a narrow-necked vase in her apartment, waiting for her to come home. Belle swung her arms enthusiastically as she walked to the Library, shaking her head a little at her own childishness but smiling nonetheless. Today was coming up roses.

When she comes everything about him is heightened. He bristles. His quips are darker, cruel, his tones more clipped, sharp enough to cut yourself on. His entire being, impossible though it should be, is suddenly _more _vivid. His gestures more extravagant, his silences harrowing. She shivers in their glare.

Fortunately, Belle has never been present in the same room whenever the woman whom she has dubbed The Widow for her unchanging hue of attire calls on Rumpelstiltskin. The task of keeping the Dark Castle has inevitably (and often _too_ coincidentally, she thinks) kept her at a distance from the beautiful woman in mourning blacks whose skin is hoarfrost white and whose mouth is red, no rose of red apple, but an open wound. She mouths fireballs from it and Rumpelstiltskin cackles his high-pitched hollow amusement and contempt.

This time she is deep in the rose garden, perfectly obscured from all but the keenest eye in the dappled green cloak he has made for her. The floral pattern blends effortlessly with the foliage around her and Belle is glad of it, as the Widow and Rumpelstiltskin go through their routine at the massive gates.

This time he has not allowed her in. They dance, she gracefully stepping a circling flirtation, he a deliberate, slow quadrille. She can't hear their conversation but from what she can see, crouched low at the tall roses' thorny feet, her impish employer is not open to the woman's persuasion. He turns away, a curt, final gesture and she follows, stepping round him in confrontation, leaning so close that for one blinding, horrific moment Belle imagines they will kiss and she hugs her arms around herself as she trembles. Why the suggestion of intimacy between the two shocks her so she has come to know full well.

_Rumpelstiltskin._

She has grown accustomed to his name, that which at first seemed too long, unsafe and unwieldy. Now it drops from her lips as easily as her own, but more often it rings low and forbidden in her head.

She must be careful with her tongue now, Nights are the most dangerous.

_Rumpelstiltskin._

"Is something the matter?"

Flustered, hair loose, sheets rumpled, she is at once upright. In the gloom of her bedroom she makes out his figure, the distinctive outline of high collar and loose sleeves in her doorway.

"I…no, why-"

His eyes are still pools in the moonlight.

"You called my name, dearie"

"Oh"

Finger combing dark tresses from her face, instantly, painfully aware of the flimsy layer her modest nightgown makes between her skin and his gaze.

"I must have been dreaming. I'm sorry, Rumpelstiltskin. Did, did I disturb your work?"

Those pools flicker. A koi carp's slow progress momentarily shivers the water's surface.

"It's no matter. Pleasant dreams, dearie", and he is gone.

She had not been asleep.

_Rumpelstiltskin. _She had whispered, curled up under the sheets, not for any want of heat but for too much of it, hiding, tucking herself away as that secret, warm flower blooms slowly inside her, his name a hushed exclamation that accompanies its unfurling.

If he should ever kiss the scarlet moth that fans in The Widow's face that flower would bloom no more, Belle confides in her bedclothes and no one, flushed, breathless, alone.

"You've become rather adept at hiding, dearie"

An amused observation and he is standing over her, fingering an open, red rose with a disinterested air. She rose, brushing grass from her knees.

"I'm very good at adapting to my environment," she replies smilingly. He grins, reptilian and sharp and she smiles all the wider for it.

"What did she want?"

The smile vanishes. Long fingers uncurl in the air.

"What she always wants, dearie. That which she can't get", he bites the last word and she shudders in spite of herself. How foolish to think that he would ever bestow the Widow with anything more than polite hostility, she thinks.

"Turning your attentions to the garden now, are we dearie?", a raised eyebrow enquires.

"Sort of, although your roses don't seem to be in need of my care. They're flowering so beautifully and it's barely the beginning of spring"

He surveyed the grounds with a bored look.

"Magic, dearie. The frost will never harm these"

Belle admired the plentiful blooms, vibrant and aromatic even in the crisp mountain air.

"It's wonderful. Thank you – for letting me wander in the gardens"

He fixed her with a stern look, as if her thanks were an affront to his mercurial sensibilities. Then his mouth curled, a smug, secretive grin.

"Tried the maze yet?"

Belle turned to the dark privet structure at the edge of the grounds. I suppose that never needs pruning either, she mused.

"No, I wasn't sure if-"

"You could manage to make it in and out again?" he prodded, bending, a slow jester's step around her. She smiled at the bait, turning to keep him square on in her vision.

" – If I was allowed to enter it", she finished, eyebrows raised in mock authority, "who knows what sort of Magical creature could be lurking in there, ready to jump out at me at any moment?"

Rumpelstiltskin giggled, rubbing his hands together in obvious glee.

"I'm the only Magical creature around here, dearie. But I applaud your suspicion. It _is_ Magical. Never the same maze twice, each time you enter it is a different labyrinth you must unravel"

He smiled a crescent moon of green and gold.

"Care to make a wager?"

She took in his expression; chin lowered, eyes raised, looking more impish and yet more human than ever. Expectant. Coy.

"That depends on the wager, Rumpelstiltskin"

"It's quite simple, dearie," his hands clasped and unclasped, "I'll wager that I can beat you, one; to the centre of the maze and two; back out of it again. What do you say?"

Belled folded her arms, briefly considering the grass at their feet.

"_I _think you have me at a disadvantage. One, it's _your_ maze, so as the owner, even if it does change with every entrance, you still know more about it than I do. Two, you have Magic. I don't have any remotely Magical powers, so I think your wager is a bit self-serving"

"Aren't all wagers, dearie?"

Belle sniggered.

"True. But," she unfolded her arms, swinging them softly against her cloak, "I _have _finished all the cleaning, and so unless the master of the Dark Castle has any more chores for his caretaker I'm at my leisure"

His eyes glinted at _master_ and narrowed at _caretaker_.

"As am I, dearie. Shall we?"

And so it was that she found herself standing at the entrance to the maze, side by side with her unpredictable employer. Belle made to step into the quiet pathway when Rumpelstiltskin shot out a faintly glittering hand to warn her back.

"Careful, dearie. You step into the maze before me and the path you start on will be completely different to mine. It's sensitive, you see," he half-whispered, confidentially, "should we enter separately, the Maze will change for each of us. We might never find each other again, never mind the center," his voice brushed her earlobe, "or the way out"

Belle shivered, huddling inside her cloak.

"Well we wouldn't want that," toes already inching backwards. Such was life with Rumpelstiltskin. Bottomless pits in harmless puddles and elation in the ordinary, the everyday. She'd brought him tea in his tower not two days prior and he'd greeted the cup she bore with a reaction worthy of a man presented with a giant pearl.

"If you would," he unfurled a hand cuffed in bronze silk and burgundy leather. She took it, delighted to find that the reptilian sheen of the appendage masked the warm, slightly weathered feel of human skin. She squeezed his hand gently and he looked askance, eyes widening, mouth slackening as if to voice incredulity, confusion. In the end he said nothing, bowing in a courtly fashion before leading her forward as they took one unanimous step into the dark green labyrinth.

She hates the white room, the loose gown that does not fit her, the almost silences. But most of all she hates the hospital.

Her palms itch, burying, fisting into the impersonal sheets. She tried at first to resist, but now almost revels in some dark unhealthy way, revels in the knowledge that she should not be here, in this room, in this hospital, in this yellow gown for the sick and injured.

She's not sure which offends her more, the boxy cut of the garment or the false quality of its sunny tone, like primroses or egg yolks. It _nags_ at her, this colour, like an errand you had meant to do but forgotten to write down, or a familiar face to which a name proves impossible to assign.

She had always been good with names. She does not know how she knows that, but it rings like something approaching truth in her chest. But still one name persists.

Who's Belle?

There are winding dark green paths in her dreams, someone forever out of sight and reach, nightmares of stone and chains and soft walls. Loneliness. Words like _talisman_ and _careful_ torment her, forming unasked for on her silent tongue.

She had smiled in her sleep, smiled at the soft reverent brush of a kiss, stroking a tamed reptile's head, a mythical lizard curled in her lap. She awoke not knowing the man who apologizes with wide, wounded eyes, whose hands and hair are not as they should be –

How should they be? How should _she _be?

There's knock at the door and the tall, dark haired woman peeks nervously around the frame, She has large blue eyes and white narrow teeth. She thinks of fangs and diverts her gaze.

"Hey"

She knows this face, this woman has been here before, but names, _names _are escaping her, water through her fingertips. Sedatives are evil, she decides. They are robbing her of everything.

"I thought you might be hungry. I mean, I know they feed you in hospitals, but I hear the food sucks"

A small brown package is placed gingerly on her bedside table. The woman fidgets, features tremulous.

"Anyway, I hope it lifts your spirits. You really like the ones we make at the diner, so…"

Words evaporate. She lifts the package and holds it gingerly in her lap. Heat radiates through the paper. Somehow it is comforting.

"I've gotta go back to work," an anxious smile, "enjoy lunch"

She isn't sure if the last part is a question or a request. The woman turns, tucking hair behind elfin ears. She swallows.

"Thank you"

A dazzling, vulnerable smile. "Anytime"

She is gone.

She unfurls the brown paper bag slowly, its hastily rolled top somehow like a delicate scroll. Steam and a warm, meaty aroma puff enthusiastically from the bag and her stomach protests happily. She unwraps the soft package therein and, not having utensils to hand and not caring for the white-clothed staff that come forever bearing needles, forgoes pressing the horrid button by her bed to take a hesitant bite.

The simultaneous joy and despair that overwhelms her is almost too much to process. Hot, delicious, satisfying, the meat and bread delight her tongue at the same moment they make her chest heave in tight anticipation and aching.

It is only when she swallows the first bite and leans forward for another that she realizes she is crying, tears splashing her hands and dotting the bag in her lap with darker, warm sun spots. She doggedly continues, stubbornly demolishing the hamburger though she sobs into every bite and her throat tightens even as she chews. She finds she cannot stop.

When there is nothing but a few scattered sesame seeds left she crumples the paper bag in her hands and wails uncaring.

He retrieves the vase from the trunk. It is solid, enduring, if she in anger and fear should throw it against a wall it will not shatter like his heart has in white shards on a hospital floor.

A single rose, taken in somewhat dubious circumstances from French's shop. He dares not face the man himself at present, with rage and anguish burning his insides and fueling the murderous streak that he had thought her urgent pleading had subdued. As of now, he is liable to tear anyone to pieces and dance on their corpse should they provoke him.

And so there is only one thing for it, he bites his tongue, inserting the stem into the vase. Away. Away. Before he raises Storybrooke to the ground and displays the pirate's mutilated body by the town border. Before she screams in fear and distrust once more, he will heed her pleas and be gone.

Away. The rose should be unnecessary, given his imminent departure, but his heart is a fool and the centuries have not yet taught it to abandon all hope. It's still dark by the time he reaches the hospital. He takes some scant comfort in the presence of Magic now, the only constant in hundreds of years or trial, failure and waiting. It is Magic that renders him invisible to the busy staff, the watchful eyes at the reception desk, Magic that opens the door to her room silently and unseen.

There is Magic too, in that sweet interval where he looks down at her sleeping form and can imagine, before cursed memory returns, imagine that she will wake and smile at him as she has before. Before, in that fantastical idyll when he woke to find her in his bed every morning, stirring towards consciousness with a soft smile on her lips and a warm embrace for him to drown that first hours of the day in.

He places the vase with its fragrant cargo by her bed and has to catch himself when he automatically stoops to kiss her, because it is too hard to remember that his kiss will not restore her memory and his body, it seems, prefers denial. He kisses the rose instead, brushing his mouth against the furled petals with salt water behind closed eyelids.

The time for pleasantries is over. He walks in uninvited, the Charmings startled and suspicious at his entrance. Her sees the way Emma moves towards Henry and David towards Emma, Mary Margaret instantly alert behind them. He wonders if her palms itch to hold a bow like his do to wring life slowly from the pirate's throat. He has laboured alone, sporadically over the years with others (Jefferson, Victor, the two harpies) but largely alone, dumbly enduring the flow of time. Their unconscious show of _togetherness_ brings poison to the back of his throat. He threatens uncaringly, sincere, seeing how Henry cowers at his words into his mother's embrace and feeling little, because Henry is not Bae and Snow and her charming prince will always be reunited and Belle, _Belle oh sweetheart_.

_Know it to be true._ And he would, is she should suffer. And he already is, if only in the dark caverns of his head where the beast rants unfettered.

Of the two words that fix in his mind he is not sure which he desires, to be told or to tell. _Come back_.

He is standing stock-still; hands folded one over the other, a look of complete self-satisfaction on his odd face when she reaches the center. Save a small pond in which coral and white carp swim the space is open, quiet.

"Part one – I win, dearie". She laughs, a little out of breath from darting around corners and fleeing dead ends. That bubbling, infectious giggle has followed and led her through the narrow pathways, spurring her on at close quarters and confounding her by sounding miles away. She is certain that he can throw his voice now.

"Alright," she conceded, "but there's still part two to come"

Rumpelstiltskin smiled, not the broad, enigmatic sweep of his jester's grin, but one of his rare quiet smiles, a small curve of barely parted lips, his features softening. Belle dared to name the unspoken something in his agate eyes as something akin to affection. She stepped slowly around the pool, her heartbeat slowing to a more comfortable pace, Rumpelstiltskin mirroring her progress, the two of them circling the water. The carp swam leisurely, fanning their tails in almost exaggerated lethargy. Belle glanced at the clear azure of the sky. We belong in a painting, she decided, delight quirking her lips into a secretive snigger. The blue and white of the sky, the orange and white splashes of the carp, the green of my cloak against the darker shade of the maze and Rumpelstiltskin wielding all these colours and more, darkly glittering and dramatic.

"Got your breath back dearie?"

She whirled round in a playful fan of green, blue and white. His lips twitched at something and she watched, fascinated.

"You haven't exhausted me yet, Rumpelstiltskin"

"It's just as well," he sniffed, "I'd hate to have to do the dusting myself"

Belle laughed gaily, walking determinedly toward the path leading out of the peaceful haven. She stopped suddenly.

"Do we have to leave here at the same time as well?" she asked thoughtfully. Rumpelstiltskin turned, considering.

"Frightened of losing?"

Belle bit her lip, "Frightened of being lost. I can't imagine it being at all pleasant"

It had almost felt like that before, when she had worn Gaston's ring on her finger and spent her morning trying not to be as idle as a lady of her station should be. It had been a hollow, half-queasy sensation, as if your carriage had taken the wrong turn at a fork in the road and you were realizing too late that other things, things you could do and things that could happen were slipping away as the wheels rolled on. Then Rumpelstiltskin had appeared and the singular, not-meant-for-me-really path had branched out into another fork, another chance. It was coincidental, really, Belle mused, that the day the Dark One had greeted them sprawled in her father's great chair she had _not _been wearing her betrothal ring, that glittering ornament which had never quite sat comfortably on her finger.

Here she was not lost.

Aside from the obvious restrictions keeping her within the Dark Castle and its grounds (which were so spacious it seemed almost churlish to call it her prison), Belle found herself at her liberty. She was to clean the collection of mysterious and baffling odds and ends that dotted the Castle's every surface, that and assist Rumpelstiltskin by bringing fresh straw and hot tea when required. But, she had reasoned after the first week; her captor was anything but a slavedriver. He placed no hours on her cleaning, made quiet requests in lieu of demands and seemed content for her to spend her leisure time doing as she wished.

Consequently, Belle had made her own itinerary, rising early to make them both tea and lightly scold his frugality (for she rarely saw Rumpelstiltskin take more than a mouthful of any of the luxuries his pantry afforded). She set a few hours before lunch in which to finish the cleaning and a few more after to continue her exploration of the library. Three weeks later and she was better read than she had been in the last three years in Avonlea.

She divided her reading with precision, for a library like Rumpelstiltskin's was several lifetimes' education in itself and she did not wish to limit her study to one area alone. She had forever, after all. Literature, anthropological texts, languages from places she'd heard of and never visited, lands she'd never heard of and longed to see, alchemical tomes that she hoped would one day enlighten her as to the many processes Rumpelstiltskin laboured meticulously over in his tower. Belle devised a firm schedule for her afternoons, only breaking it to pour tea and coax fractured stories from her increasingly fascinating employer.

Here it felt right to be Belle, to speak her mind and ask what she would. Here she was her most unadulterated self.

Rumpelstiltskin stared at her in silence, as if her words held some deeper, intricate meaning. The only sound came from the pool, a deep stroke disturbing the surface. Carp blew bubbles and somewhere the world was turning slowly to the march of time.

"No," he answered shortly, "that rule only applies to the first entrance of the maze"

Belle's shoulders sank in visible relief, "Well then," she decided, "see you on the other side!"

And with that she grasped her skirts in both hands and flew out of sight. Rumpelstiltskin stood a moment longer by the pool, the white, shimmering scales of the sleepy fish blurring with the white of stocking clad ankles that her flight had startlingly revealed. He closed his eyes in thought. Her clear voice called out to him from beyond the high walls of neat privet.

"Rumpelstiltskin!"

He stood motionless, eyes closed to better savour the sound of his name on her lips, somehow fresh and unfettered. She called out again, softer, half-spoken. He shivered in intimate enjoyment, imagined her perfect mouth whispering through the dark leaves. _Find me._

"Rumpelstiltskin?"

Silently, slowly, he mouthed her name back in response.

_Belle_. A secret, whole treasure, as perfect and prompt as his name is cumbersome and unsavoury.

"Coming, dearie!" A shrill threat he does not believe, spinning on a booted heel and disappearing in a flap of leather and silk.

Lost.

That, she supposes is the most succinct way to describe her state. Everything alien, suspicious, strange. Everyone is secretive, unresponsive, guarded. She floats, unsettled, a stray balloon neither blown skyward nor snagged by firm branches. There is a rose by her bed. A rose in an ancient looking vase.

Perhaps-

She thinks of the man who holds fireballs and brings her a damaged teacup. She hugs her arms around herself.

The rose is beautiful, only half-open. She can just about detect the sweet fragrance of its unfurling petals. It clamours, just like yellow and talisman and the unanswered questions she only half remembers asking before the sedatives dragged her under again. She reaches slowly, uncertainly and takes it in hand. The petals are velvet and soft to her fingertips and her mouth lifts into the glimmer of a smile in spite of her misgiving. She lifted the flower to her nose and inhaled, the sweet, oddly exciting perfume closing her eyelids for her.

Lost.

She couldn't even begin to fathom how he'd managed to appear in front of her without some kind of Magical cheating involved, but the switch from the hunted to the hunter spurred her on, as did his challenging grins and echoing giggles. She ran around the winding corners, straining to catch a glimpse of stiff leather and billowing cuff as he slipped forever out of reach.

Skipping, twirling, breathless, she laughed as she ran, the thrill of the chase and the challenge of escaping the disorientating snakes of monotonous green lending a lightness, a speed to her feet. A knowing snigger sounded just beyond the wall her fingertips trailed against and Belle grinned in triumph, for things were ever the opposite of what they seemed with Rumpelstiltskin. She fled away from the too-near sound, chasing nothingness, hot with anticipation as she finally caught the whisper of a coattail disappearing around the corner ahead.

_Found you._ The mountain air was flushed with the scent of roses, blooming ahead of their time.

Belle opened her eyes.


End file.
